


Secret to a Long Life

by artemisgrace



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alcohol, American Old West AU, Character Death, Crime, Explicit Sexual Content, Fluff and Angst, Happy Ending, M/M, Period-Typical Homophobia, Suicidal Thoughts, Terminal illness mention, additonal tags to be added as we go along, and additional characters as they show up, good old fashioned murder, highwaymen and runaways, in the bad ending, in the good ending, side Armin/Mikasa, though it's barely mentioned, two endings: one good one bad
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-15
Updated: 2018-04-10
Packaged: 2018-07-24 05:58:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 15
Words: 42,296
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7496571
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/artemisgrace/pseuds/artemisgrace
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A rather boring life becomes much more exciting for Eren Jaeger upon a chance encounter with the highwayman, Levi Ackerman, and before too long he finds himself on the run, in the arms of one of the most wanted criminals in the west.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. A Peculiar Customer

Another dusty day gave way to another dusty night, the sun setting over the west, as Eren Jaeger rested his forearms on the bar’s counter, the rough wood grain catching on his sleeves. He watched the dust motes drift through the oil-lamp light, dancing in little swirls as the air eddied and flowed like a river in response to Eren’s breaths. Business had been slow today, hardly any wagons had passed through town, and the new railroad stop was still under construction and wouldn’t be dropping off passengers any time soon. Besides, Sunday is hardly a heavy drinking day. It was, as made evident by the weekly routine of the townsfolk, clear that sinning wasn’t for Sunday, just every other day of the week. Eren himself had been to church that morning. He was religious, he supposed, but in a pretty casual capacity. He’d pray to God like everyone else, but it didn’t really affect him the rest of the time. He wouldn’t call it an even remotely defining aspect of his personality. He’d never experienced divine intervention himself, but he wasn’t going to rule anything out, in case God really was an active force who’d take offense. He expected most people probably felt the same, though they’d never in their lives say so aloud. People like to feel self-righteous and indignant whenever they can. Everybody wants to be better than someone else. Anyway, Sunday wasn’t a busy day in the saloon, despite the town’s assortment of drunks. Eren had been here since five in the morning, and he couldn’t have seen more than twelve people walk in.

It was a good job though. Decent pay, if you included the free room and board he received for working in the saloon, serving food and drinks and mopping up. He had a small room upstairs, a bit grimy, the room barely bigger than the bed he slept in, but a place to sleep all the same. He hadn’t even had that when he first came west, trying to get away from his family, to expand his world a bit. It wasn’t that much of an expansion, as it turned out daily life was pretty much the same everywhere, eating, drinking, working, sleeping, same as everyone everywhere else. But he’d made a place of his own, with no lack of effort and hard work. Being an outsider in a small town like this didn’t afford a very friendly welcome, and it had taken him a fair amount of time to make some friends around here, to get a job, and to establish a place for himself in the community. He hadn’t been in town even a year yet though, and didn’t yet know everyone. Mostly he knew the people who frequented the bar in which he worked. Luckily, he’d found that stubbornness and hard work were respected around here, qualities which he possessed, even if it could sometimes extend to the point of stupidity, as his employer, Mr. Campbell, had often pointed out to him. Eren didn’t have many close friends in these parts, but he didn’t have any enemies here either, which was something anyway. 

Eren’s boredom was interrupted by the saloon door swinging open with a light creak, stirring up the dust motes in the lamp light. It had admittedly been a while since Eren had last greased those hinges, he recalled with a small amount of guilt. He stood up straight from his position leaning on the counter to welcome what would probably, he hoped, be the last customer of the day.

“Good evening, sir, what can I get for you?” Eren called out across the room with what little cheer he could muster after a long, dull day of tending the bar. 

The man entering the bar cut a bit of a strange figure. He was unusually well dressed for the type of guy who tends to visit the saloon at this time of night. Business never really ended, as there were some ladies of the night in residence in the rooms above the bar who’d take customers overnight, but the bar itself did have a closing time. This man didn’t appear the usual sort of late night guest, his clothes were of a superior quality, neat and exceptionally clean, and Eren was pretty sure that waistcoat was silk. He could see that the man’s pocket watch wasn’t the typical unsophisticated pewter affair, but gold, proper gold. Maybe engraved, even. Not some bumbling midnight drunk then, but a proper gentleman. Who just happened to have wandered into the bar at less than gentlemanly hour. 

The gentleman strode up to the bar, shiny boots crossing the floor, the boards he trod on equally polished, not by deliberate actions, but just the wear of many feet on rough-hewn planks. He had a handsome face, this newcomer, but awfully serious, Eren thought. No wonder the man was coming to the bar. If anyone ever looked in need of a stiff drink, it was this guy. Reaching the counter, the man spoke in a low, but pleasing, almost melodic voice.

“A whiskey please. Whatever is the best in the house.”

Well, going by his clothes, Eren supposed he shouldn’t be surprised the man had ordered the house’s best. He looked like the sort of gent who always took the best. Must have had a fair wad of cash at his disposal too. That’d sure be nice, Eren thought, to have those kinds of funds. And the fellow had manners. It wasn’t too often that Eren heard a please from a customer, except for the ladies upstairs who ordered a drink from time to time, who were friendly and polite mostly as a matter of business. This man was obviously on a different plane than himself, but Eren already thought he could like this guy. He had a good feeling about him. 

Eren busied himself with getting the man his whiskey, while the man took his place at the counter, jumping up a little, Eren noted with mild amusement, to sit upon a bar stool. The guy was significantly shorter than Eren, even though he had the demeanor of a much larger man. It was his eyes, probably, that gave that impression. They were a cool grey, bright, and terribly sharp. A piercing steel gaze that suggested he could see right through you, and having seen your inner self, didn’t consider you to be worth his time. Eren admired that quiet fierceness. He seemed the kind of man who was polite not because he feared others, but because he could take them easily. Because he had absolutely nothing to prove. 

Eren set the gentleman’s drink down on the counter in front of him with a gentle clink, and found those sharp grey eyes focused on himself, a little flash of nervousness going through him as he made eye contact. Quite unsure of how to react to the gaze of this stranger, Eren gave the man his friendliest smile, as he took the coin left on the counter as payment. 

“I haven’t seen you in these parts before, sir. Are you a new arrival? I haven’t been here long myself, so I’m still meeting new people every day,” Eren recognized that he was beginning to jabber at the man, and quickly silenced himself. The man had come here for a drink, not to have a grubby teenaged boy babble at him over the counter. Eren’s smile faltered a bit, taking on more of a nervous quality. 

The man’s eyes seemed to soften a bit at that, perhaps amused by Eren’s idiocy, or perhaps pitying him for it.

“I haven’t been in town for a while, but I’m no stranger here. Levi Ackerman,” the man answered coolly, nodding in Eren’s direction, Eren supposed, in lieu of a handshake. 

Oh, perhaps Eren had only arrived after the last time this Mr. Ackerman had been in town. If they’d been here at the same time, Eren was sure he’d have remembered it. The man made quite an impression, not exactly the type one would easily forget. He’d have to ask Mr. Campbell about Mr. Ackerman later. It would be rather impolite to quiz a man about himself while he was trying to have a quiet drink. 

Eren watched as Mr. Ackerman sipped slowly at his whiskey, rather than chuck it down his throat in a single gulp the way he’d seen many men take it. This was the finer stuff though, and Eren supposed that the thing to do with the finer stuff must be to savor it. Eren had never had much of a taste for whiskey himself, he didn’t enjoy the way it burned in his throat and sat uncomfortably in his belly, and it was somewhat reminiscent, to him, of cough syrup, which was frankly awful. But then again, he’d only had the cheapest stuff. Maybe the best was a totally different beast. That, or this Mr. Ackerman simply had a very strong stomach. Perhaps someday Eren would have a sip and see for himself.  
Placing his glass down on the table with a gentle clink, Levi looked to Eren again, this time with an expectant expression.

“And you are?”

Oh, shit, Eren had totally forgotten to introduce himself. How very smooth of him.

“Um . . . E-eren, Eren Jaeger.”

Mr. Ackerman chuckled lightly, a small smirk playing across his serious face, and brushed his dark hair back with a surprisingly delicate hand. 

“Forgot your own name? Well, aren’t you a suave conversationalist.”

Eren pouted a bit at that. He knew he seemed a fool, but this Mr. Ackerman didn’t have to point it out. Especially in language like that. Eren knew what he meant from reading books his father had left behind, but he’d only had a sixth grade education, which, although it was the standard, didn’t include much in the way of vocabulary words. Eren hated to seem like a hick, and he would most certainly seem one if confronted with words he didn’t know. And he knew there must be many he did not know. If the fellow kept this up, Eren may have to rescind his initial sense of admiration for him.

Mr. Ackerman, however, much to his credit, seemed to sense Eren’s distress, and added, “It’s alright, kid. I meant no real offense.”

Not quite an apology, but close enough to one for Eren to be appeased. Perhaps the fellow had intended friendly banter, but was in fact, like Eren, not much of a “suave conversationalist.” If he didn’t mean to offend, Eren supposed it was fine. 

“None taken, Mr. Ackerman,” Eren replied, flashing a smile again to show he’d forgiven the slight. 

To Eren’s surprise and pleasure, Mr. Ackerman smiled back. A smile with teeth and everything, not another little smirk. Gosh, it was a nice smile. Pretty. Eren shook his head at that particular thought, shooing it away and earning himself a questioning look from Mr. Ackerman. Eren shot back a questioning look of his own, as if to suggest that it was Mr. Ackerman who’d acted strangely by looking at him, trying to downplay his own odd behavior. He wasn’t prepared to let that thought be known to the general public, and especially not to Mr. Ackerman himself. It was terribly embarrassing. As was the awkward silence that followed closely on its heels. 

“Well,” Mr. Ackerman said after a few moments of quiet, as he moved to get up from his stool with a sort of fluid grace that rather impressed Eren, “I’d better be going. It’s well after closing time, isn’t it?”

Eren looked at the grandfather clock Mr. Campbell kept in the corner, his most prized timepiece, and Eren’s eyes widened in shock upon seeing the time. It was well after one o’ clock in the morning, very, very well after closing time. He’d have to get up in four hours, and that’s if he passed out this very moment. But he still had to close up the bar, and the cleaning to do. He’d been so absorbed in chatting with Mr. Ackerman that he hadn’t even noticed the usual drunken regulars stumbling out the door, leaving a trail of spilt beer and crumbs in their wake, as they always did. It hadn’t seemed like the two of them had talked very long or said very much. But, Eren supposed, they really hadn’t. Most of the time, Eren had just been stood there silently as Mr. Ackerman savored his drink, watching the man intently and probably coming off as more than a little strange. 

Eren jumped up himself as Mr. Ackerman left his seat, realizing that he’d been leaning on the counter again, closer to this peculiar customer than he’d intended to be. He expected to see the man take off in the direction of the door, to go out into the night someplace. He must have someplace to stay in town. Unless he opted for camping, but a man who dressed like Mr. Ackerman didn’t seem the type who’d go much for the great outdoors when he could have a proper bed to lie upon. Eren couldn’t blame him there. 

Mr. Ackerman, however, contrary to Eren’s expectations, turned the other way, moving towards the staircase at the back behind the bar that led upstairs to the rooms of the ladies of the night and Eren himself. Did Mr. Ackerman have an appointment with one of the ladies, or had he rented a room of his own? Eren hoped it was the latter, though he couldn’t for true tell himself why. Must be the noise, he thought. Whenever one of the ladies in his hall had a visitor, some of the noise would inevitably filter through the relatively thin walls into his room, at first shocking him, then later, as he got used to it, simply irritating the hell out of him. He couldn’t stand the thought of hearing those noises tonight, especially since he would have to get up again in a scant three hours, and especially not from this Mr. Ackerman. It wasn’t a comfortable thing to consider, even hypothetically. It couldn’t do too much harm to ask Mr. Ackerman could it? As long as he didn’t mention the potential prostitute involvement or the associated noise issue.

“Oh, have you rented a room here, Mr. Ackerman?” Eren asked, hoping he appeared more casual about the question than he felt.

“Not exactly,” Mr. Ackerman replied smoothly, and Eren winced internally at the implication before the man continued, “but Mr. Campbell holds a room for me. We have an understanding. Goodnight, Mr. Jaeger.”

“Goodnight, Mr. Ackerman,” Eren called after him, his voice too loud to his own ears, before trailing off rather pathetically.

Mr. Ackerman continued up the stairs to the second floor, leaving Eren standing at the bottom with more questions than he started with, and a lot of cleaning to do. As he swept the floors and wiped down the counter and tables, Eren pondered what kind of understanding Mr. Ackerman might have with Mr. Campbell. Eren had never heard a Mr. Ackerman mentioned, not by Mr. Campbell, nor anyone else in town for that matter, but clearly there was something important about him, if Mr. Campbell would keep a room reserved specially for him, and especially if he’d been out of town for so long. Or perhaps Mr. Ackerman just had so much cash on hand that he could pay for a room even when he wasn’t staying in it. All of a sudden, Mr. Ackerman seemed even stranger than he had when he first walked in. Who was Mr. Ackerman, really? 

Eren finished up downstairs and put out all the lamps except for one, which he took as lighting to guide himself up the darkened stairs and down the blessedly quiet hall to his room. Opening the door with a light creak, as it had been a while since he’d greased these hinges too, he hung the lantern on its hook beside the doorframe, where it could cast its gentle light over the interior of Eren’s small living space. 

He closed the door behind him and set about getting ready for bed, even though he’d be up sooner than he cared to think about, stripping himself of that day’s clothes and giving himself a brief once over with a wet washcloth from his small basin of water. He’d also bought himself a toothbrush and some paste to clean his teeth, though he knew most people around here didn’t bother, especially the men who found cleanliness too feminine for their frankly fragile egos. But Eren’s sister, now living with her husband in New Orleans, had taught him to care for his oral health. She said a good many people died before their time simply because of dirty teeth. He couldn’t be certain if she was exaggerating or not, but he’d rather not ignore her word and end up a toothless old man or a diseased young man. It’d be bad enough being toothless or diseased, without his sister constantly telling him “I told you so,” so he gave his teeth a good clean tonight as he did every night. 

He blew out the lamp and threw himself into bed, the sensation of sinking slightly into his mattress pure bliss to him after such a long day. He had pulled the covers up to his chest and settled in for what would be more of a long nap than a night’s sleep, when he heard something that made him pause and sit up a bit. There was someone in the room next to his, and they were humming a gentle tune, some sort of lullaby, like the ones his mother had sung years ago. He listened intently, and, to his sleepy astonishment, he recognized the voice. He couldn’t be absolutely certain of course, but he was pretty sure the voice belonged to Mr. Ackerman, staying in the room next to his. He fell back into his pillow with a yawn, still listening to the soothing voice from the other room, and began to drift off into a deep, dreamless sleep. 

On the other side of the wall, without his knowledge, Levi Ackerman sang Eren Jaeger to sleep.


	2. Gift from a Highwayman

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eren learns a bit more about the man he met the night before, and a gift from said man leaves him with new questions

Waking up the next morning was absolute hell. Eren had never in his life cursed anything so much as he cursed the rays of sunlight that filtered through the thin cotton sheet he’d tacked up as a curtain and fell upon his face. Running a hand over said displeased visage, Eren could feel the crease marks left on his cheek by his bedsheets and groaned, expressing his profound anguish at the prospect of getting up. With a long, drawn-out protestation emerging from his dry throat, Eren sat up, accepting the fate that lay in wait for him: another long day on even less sleep. 

He performed the day’s ablutions in a manner somewhat less than enthusiastic, splashing his face with water from the bowl on his bedside table hurriedly, as if speed could equal cognizance of his surroundings. It couldn’t. As it was, he smacked into the doorframe as he left his room, making his nose rather sore, and his pride a bit more so, as walking face first into a doorframe could hardly be described as elegant. He quickly rubbed his nose with a hand and held it before his eyes, checking for blood, but luckily, though it may have hurt like the devil, his nose hadn’t broken or bled. 

Eren’s pride took yet another blow, a much harder one, a moment later when he heard a low chuckle off to his left. It was Mr. Ackerman, who had left his own room next door just in time to be witness to the spectacle of Eren humiliating himself and injuring himself in one stroke. The boy froze, and stared at the man for a moment, his mouth open, eyes wide, before he quickly turned and began booking it down the staircase, running from his embarrassment on feet that he hoped would be nimble enough to avoid tripping, lest the chuckle behind him became a guffaw. He was having a rough enough morning as it was, he didn’t need any more humiliation today. Of course Mr. Ackerman, his newest acquaintance, the most elegant and well-dressed man he’d ever met, would be the one to see him make a fool of himself in his sleep-deprived state. Just his luck. 

Exiting the staircase at such a speed proved a poor idea, his boot clad feet skidding across the smooth surface of the wood floor and sending him careening into the bar, where a rather sensitive part of his anatomy made hard contact with the counter edge. Upon impact, Eren cursed the counter even more than he had cursed the sun’s rays this morning, uttering words that would most certainly have earned him a slap from his sister, were she here. What those words earned him, however, was a sharp glare from his employer, Mr. Campbell, from across the room. There probably would have been sharp words to accompany said sharp glare, but as Eren doubled over, his eyes watering, it became apparent that he’d been suitably punished already, and Mr. Campbell refrained from informing him of his idiocy. Eren was most certainly already aware of it.

Standing upright and trying to act as if he hadn’t just possibly damaged his future potential to reproduce, Eren took up his position behind the counter, blinking away the burning of tears in his eyes. The sound of a plate sliding across rough woodgrain drew his attention downwards and, to his eternal gratitude, he found himself faced with a sandwich that Mr. Campbell had kindly pushed in front of him, perhaps pitying him for his most recent humiliation and agony combination. Eren swore he wasn’t usually this clumsy, it was just a lack of sleep. He did have some skills, even if, this morning, they didn’t appear to include walking. Besides, it was really Mr. Ackerman’s fault. He was the reason Eren had stayed up so late, and he was the reason Eren had run down the stairs so fast and collided with the bar counter. 

He ate his sandwich angrily, tearing off mouthfuls of bread and meat and chewing them with more force than necessary, his jaw clicking in a way that only served to increase his annoyance. There was hardly anyone in the bar anyway, he could have slept in another hour or so without any catastrophic consequences, if only Mr. Campbell hadn’t established a starting time upon his employment. After all, Monday morning was only slightly busier than Sunday evening, and only the most devoted worshippers of the cheap whiskey bottle sat upon the crude wooden benches, leaning over the table and staring into their drinks as if the glasses held the answers to life’s greatest mysteries. Though they probably did, Eren considered, as far as these men were concerned. To each their own priorities, he supposed. His own priorities, at the moment, included inhaling his sandwich at maximum speed. Mr. Ackerman had been just behind him as he left the hall, the man would be coming down the stairs any second, and while he didn’t especially want to face the man after the show he’d made of himself only minutes ago, Eren absolutely didn’t want to face him with a mouth full of sandwich and a face covered in crumbs.

The man himself appeared, almost as if he’d been summoned by the thought of him, just as Eren swallowed his last bite and wiped his face with a shirt sleeve. To Eren’s steadily increasing irritation, Mr. Ackerman sat at the bar counter directly across from him, a small smile playing on his lips. Eren readied himself for some sort of teasing remark, but was pleasantly surprised by what the man actually said.

“Are you alright?”

Looking again, Eren saw less of a teasing quality to the smile, and more one of friendly concern. A portion of his irritation dissipated. Maybe it hadn’t actually been necessary to take off so quickly down the stairs. 

“Oh, um, yes, I’m fine.”

“Really?” Mr. Ackerman raised an eyebrow, “It looked like you landed pretty hard.”

Oh Lord, Mr. Ackerman had seen him crash into the bar. Fantastic. Eren looked down, picked up a cloth from under the bar, and began vigorously scrubbing the counter between them, to distract himself from his rising embarrassment.

“No, I’m fine,” he said, stubbornly, but a bit unconvincingly. 

“Well, just so long as you’re fine,” Mr. Ackerman’s smile widened a bit, “You had me worried there for a moment.”

Eren blushed a little despite himself. Mr. Ackerman, worried about him, Eren? Well that was . . . nice. 

“Well, thank you, sir, for your concern,” Eren gave the man a grin. A grin which shortly fell off his face as the man stood up from his bar stool all too soon, not even having had a drink or a meal, and right when Eren felt like they were beginning to get somewhere. More than a sentence exchanged between the two made it a proper conversation, their first. Even though not much had actually been said . . .

“Oh are you going already, Mr. Ackerman?” Eren inquired, trying not to sound too disappointed about the man’s departure, nor too eager to have him stay. 

“Yes,” the man said, straightening his cravat and smoothing down his waistcoat with a pair of impeccably clean hands, “I’m afraid I have something I can’t be late for.”

“Oh . . .,” Eren would have liked to ask what it was that drew Mr. Ackerman away, but he didn’t feel that they were familiar enough with each other to ask that yet. Maybe if Mr. Ackerman stuck around long enough, they could be. The man turned away, and Eren prepared to spend another day without much conversation, nor the excitement of handsome strangers, until Mr. Ackerman turned around again, facing back to the bar, and back to Eren. 

“Hey, kid,” Mr. Ackerman called out to him, a gentle warmth spreading in his chest at the attention. The man strode back the few steps he’d taken, moving right up to the counter, and Eren blushed a little at the sudden close proximity. That blush deepened considerably as Mr. Ackerman reached across the space between them and took Eren’s right hand in both of his. The man’s hands were warm, softer than one might expect from a man with such a stern resting face, and there was something in them, something Mr. Ackerman was pressing into Eren’s hand, gently but firmly.

Mr. Ackerman released his hand and he looked down to see a coin resting upon his palm, gold, more money than Eren had ever seen before in one place. Staring down at the gold piece in his hand, mouth gaping, Eren couldn’t fully believe what he’d been handed. He looked up, mouth still ajar in shock, up into the amused face of Mr. Ackerman. 

“Wha- I can’t possibly accept this!” Eren exclaimed, resulting in another small chuckle from the man across from him.

“Of course you can, don’t be ridiculous. It’s terribly impolite not to accept a gift that’s been given to you. Besides,” Mr. Ackerman added with a small smile, “think of it as compensation for your unfortunate incident this morning. You were running from me, after all, were you not?”

Eren blushed furiously, hand still held out in front of him awkwardly, protesting, “I wasn’t running from you, I was . . . in a hurry, that’s all.” He was aware that he sounded less than convincing, but it was all he could do, really, to save face at this point. 

“Oh, my mistake,” Mr. Ackerman smiled at Eren’s stubborn, pouting face. “Well, I’d better be going,” he said, turning once again and striding towards the door.

“Wait!” Eren called out after him, blushing again when he realized how unnecessarily loud he’d been. 

The man looked back at him, expectantly, eyebrows raised in a questioning expression. 

“Um . . .” Eren hesitated a moment before continuing, pocketing the coin, “Thank you very much, Mr. Ackerman.”

“Call me Levi,” the man shot him one last smile before heading out the door, the hinges squeaking lightly as he pulled it open by the cast iron handle. 

“Bye!” Eren called after him as he passed the doorframe, “. . . Levi . . .”

His voice trailed off at the name, still foreign upon his lips, as he watched the door swing shut behind Mr. Ackerman, no, Levi. He hadn’t realized just how intently he’d been staring at the now closed door, that is until he was startled by Mr. Campbell’s voice right beside him.

“Wipe down the counter a bit over there, will you Eren? It’s rather sticky,” the man said, pointing down to the other end of the counter from where Eren had been standing.

“Oh, yes, sir.” Eren got to it right away, scrubbing busily at the countertop. A thought crossed his mind, that he could ask Mr. Campbell about this . . . Levi . . . since the two of them obviously knew each other, well enough for Mr. Campbell to hold a room for him, seemingly indefinitely.

“Say,” Eren began, addressing Mr. Campbell in a purposefully casual tone, “does Mr. Ackerman live here? In town, I mean? It seems that he knows you, and you him.”

Mr. Campbell looked up from the glass he had begun polishing with a clean rag, “Well, not exactly. It’s more that he comes and goes. He does often stay for a while though, especially in the winter. Those times he takes a room here, upstairs.”

“So you know him well then?” Eren surreptitiously side-eyed his employer as he spoke, still scrubbing away at the bar counter, “He seems like an awful fancy gentleman to be spending his time in these parts.” 

The town wasn’t by any means a back-water, backwards place, but neither did it house the cream of American society. Mostly, everyone was the same kind of poor, so no one felt particularly poor, at least no more so than their neighbor. It probably helped, Eren thought, to keep the peace, everyone being poor. There wasn’t quite so much envy that could lead to unrest. Not that there wasn’t the occasional brawl or nasty rumor, of course, those are a staple of small towns, a chief export, if you will. 

Mr. Campbell turned to Eren, his face somewhat more stern than before, and spoke to the boy in a slightly hushed voice, “Look, I’m only going to tell you this because I know you’re a trustworthy kid, not one to gossip. And because you’ll most certainly hear it at some point if you stay here, and I’d rather you heard it from someone who knows the man personally, and likes him.”

Eren looked to him expectantly, a bit surprised at the apparent secrecy surrounding Levi. Was he some sort of aristocrat? Maybe one of those fantastically rich railway men? He seemed unusually polite for that sort of man, if he indeed was one. Those types didn’t tend to say thank you to a bartender, let alone one obviously younger than themselves. 

Mr. Campbell went on in a hushed voice, “No one knows anything for absolute certain, mind, no one looks into Mr. Ackerman or his business, and there’s a reason for that. You see, the unspoken understanding is that he’s a highwayman. He holds up the occasional coach, taking cash and valuables, but he’s never killed or injured anyone, at least not anyone we knew, and he spends all of that money here, in town, so we’ve no real reason to want him caught. In fact, if truth be told, he’s doing a great job of keeping the town thriving. I don’t know what our economy would be like if he didn’t spend his money here.” 

Eren blinked, surprised. Well, he hadn’t thought “highwayman” upon seeing Levi. The man looked too . . . sophisticated for an outlaw. He’d expect an outlaw who’d struck rich to wear fine clothes, of course, but he wouldn’t expect a rough criminal type to have such good taste, to look so put together in his fine clothes. Levi did have a powerful, confident air about him though, making him seem a bigger man than he was, a man it would not be wise to challenge. Now that he thought about it, Eren could see how such a man could engage in such a daring and dangerous enterprise. He could probably just stare down the coaches with those icy steel eyes of his, not needing even to threaten anyone to relieve them of their valuables, they’d just hand them over to be free of the glare.

“Oh . . .” Eren managed, unsure exactly what he was expected to say.

“Oh indeed,” replied Mr, Campbell, maintaining his serious tone, “Now you must promise me, Eren, that you will not speak of this about town. Respect the balance we have here, and don’t start up any trouble. Keep yourself to yourself and you’ll do well.”

“Yes, sir,” Eren answered, “of course.”

“Good lad, I knew that you wouldn’t start trouble, it just needed to be said. And, you know, I think our Mr. Ackerman is quite fond of you, I haven’t seen him smile much before, at least never a smile that made it to his eyes,” the man went on, clapping Eren on the shoulder in a friendly manner before heading to the back behind the bar area, likely to do check inventory, or something. 

“Yes, sir,” Eren nodded. He would most definitely keep it to himself. He may not abide by the law, but Levi didn’t seem a bad man, and to have Mr. Campbell assure him of it to his face made him quite certain Levi was safe. Awfully nice, in fact, to use the money to keep the town afloat, and to give such an extravagant present as he had to a mere bartender, some kid he didn’t even know. It made Eren’s chest a little warm to think that Levi like him in particular. Not many people liked him in particular.

It occurred to Eren that the coin he’d been given, seeing as Levi was a highwayman, was probably someone’s stolen property. It didn’t feel exactly right to keep it, but it’s not like he could possibly find the person who’s lost it and return it to them. He might as well keep it, put it to good use, and let it continue circulating in the economy. Everyone else in town appeared to see it that way, so who was he to second guess it. Besides . . . having money felt awfully nice. Some amount of security wasn’t half bad. 

Eren leaned on the just-cleaned counter, his sleeves catching on the wood and dampness seeping into the fabric from the wet countertop, both going unnoticed by him. He was lost in thought, gazing at the door through which Levi had left. He wondered what it was that the man couldn’t be late for. 

He hoped that Levi would stick around.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Eren, you nauseating adolescent, you're crushing hardcore. "Handsome stranger?" Get ahold of yourself. But luckily it's not entirely a one way street.


	3. Coach Robbery

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We get a glimpse into the life and past of Levi, as well as his feelings regarding a certain bartender we all know.

The job had gone down well, a simple coach robbery, nothing fancy, but always profitable. Levi brushed his gloved hands down his waistcoat, dusting off the grit the coach wheels had thrown up into the air as it stopped at the sight of Levi’s face, obscured by a handkerchief, and his pistol, the sunlight glinting off the metal most menacingly. The robbery had gone like clockwork, but then, he’d had a lot of practice in that field. 

Counting his spoils, he thought it to have been a decent take, nothing extravagant, but the money would spend well. Levi made a point of not taking too much, as one wouldn’t want to arouse the interest of law enforcement, but the local law was lazy and unmotivated, so he could take a bit, at least, without attracting any attention. Everyone has to make a living, be it legally and morally sound, or not. 

The passengers hadn’t kicked up much of a fuss, coach robbery being not uncommon in this part of the country, and thought to be largely inevitable misfortune for the frequent traveler. They waited patiently, relatively calmly, as if in line for train tickets, as Levi went through their belongings in search of cash and valuables. Indeed, the passengers counted themselves lucky, seeing as they could just as easily have run into a less savory sort of highwayman, the type to take more than they could afford, including their lives. Levi made a point of not being that kind of man, as a matter of pride. That was not to say that he had never killed a man before, of course he had, but never anyone who didn’t absolutely deserve it. 

And, of course, this particular method of thievery earned him a certain amount of respect, among both the law-abiding, and the law-defying communities. No unnecessary damage or excessive theft meant that the townspeople weren’t very actively interested in stopping him, particularly if he spent the money in town at their businesses. And it also instilled a certain fear in the hearts of other criminals, upon the realization that Levi took no lives, not because he was too weak to do so, but because he was strong enough that he had no need to. Levi could do everything they could do without resorting to such fear tactics as murder. There is some honor among thieves, if not much, even if Levi was the only example of it within a hundred or so miles. 

Levi had never quite been on the right side of the law, the son of a prostitute didn’t get much of a chance to be, and he’d been expected all his life, by everyone who knew his background, to get into trouble, and so a sort of confirmation bias developed surrounding him. They expected trouble of Levi so much that, when he didn’t get into trouble, those who had judged him, grew to hate him. No one likes anything less than someone defying their expectations, and nothing angers people more than being wrong. And thus, instead of him finding trouble, trouble found him, and it never really left him alone.

There was a point at which he ceased trying so hard to stay away from unlawful activities. He’d get the public shame and disgust, and often the legal consequences, whether he really did it or not, so he might as well do it. Might as well take advantage of the perks of the lifestyle, not the least of them being the money. It was a lot of money. And that money had been Levi’s ticket out of the slum, out of his outcast status, out of his previous life, and into a new one. If anything could totally change how others perceived you, it would be cash. So it had been for Levi. 

His newfound wealth had brought him the admiration that had eluded him all his life, but it filled him with disgust, that these people were so easily swayed by mere coins, that they were so deeply petty. The admiration of such people meant nothing to him. They had never acknowledged his mother for the beautiful, kind woman she was, they had never tried to, and when she died, none of them cried, but all of them were more than eager to cozy up to Levi and his cash; before the hearse had even pulled away, they mobbed him with feigned concern and false sympathy. He couldn’t stand it. So he left. He traveled. He ended up going West, into new territory, some of it only very recently touched by Western civilization, not yet even attached to the railroads now spider-webbing their way across the continent. 

He was a mystery here. The only things that people knew about Levi were the things that Levi himself chose to tell them. It felt wonderfully freeing, life in this new territory, this anonymity, so he chose to wander here, to never go back East. Not if he could help it. And people loved mystery as a rule, but especially out here, where so often people found themselves knowing altogether too much about the people around them. So they loved Levi. 

He looked rich too, bedecked in the finest he could afford, and he could afford practically anything he could want by now. He saw no real reason to not take the best when he at last had access to it. Silk, fabric that won’t chafe the skin, is hardly unappealing. There is nothing quite like the feel of silk and satin on skin that’s been calloused by the wear of burlap and canvas over years of discomfort. And of course, people love people who look rich, he’d learned that to be a fact, as sure as gravity, as sure as the sunrise. People will be far more helpful to a rich man who needs no aid, than to the poorest of the poor, who needs aid the most. You would think that to be nonsensical, that is, until you consider the selfish nature of humankind. People are helpful to the rich, rather than the poor, because they’re not being helpful out of the goodness of their hearts, but out of blind self-interest, because they want to see what they can get out of it. They’d much prefer to help themselves than the needy. Such a thing would make Levi’s heart heavy, had he not learnt to accept it long ago, and twist this way of thinking to his advantage.

And twist it he did. He acted the gentleman born into money, the new world aristocrat, and people bought it, unquestioningly, treating him with the highest esteem. No one here knew his history, and if things went to plan, no one ever would. Unfortunately, this plan of his didn’t allow much opportunity for personal relationships; it left little time for getting close to anyone, and besides, with his way of life, getting too close may be inadvisable. Perhaps one day he could settle down and have all that, a permanent residence, a lover, perhaps a family. Or not. None of us can tell the future, and that of a highwayman like himself would, no doubt, be particularly uncertain. Especially considering that his . . . inclinations weren’t exactly the traditional ideal. Levi doubted he’d ever find a woman to settle down with, and a man . . . well, while that might be preferable, it was much less likely in this social climate. 

He’d heard of distant lands, though he couldn’t actually remember the specifics, as these things were only spoken of in a sort of whispered, horrified wonder, where that sort of thing was accepted, but not here, not in the world Levi had access to. And as the Western world impressed its values on land after land, whatever acceptance there may be in those places would likely be crushed. A pity, really, that Levi’s society was one of conquest and puritanical shame, so very inhospitable to people such as himself. He supposed he’d just have to accept that too. 

At least on the surface, he’d accept it. That particular horror of his kind stemmed from a religious viewpoint Levi didn’t much care for. Levi wasn’t a religious man, and he’d found religion to be less of a medium for enlightenment than a tool to keep the more individualistic of people down. Perhaps this was a cynical view, but in Levi’s long experience, he’d seen faith twisted and turned into a means of justifying hatred far too many times. He’d like to believe otherwise, but the evidence he’d been shown, the distinct lack of kindness that he’d been subjected to before he began amassing his fortune, made that nigh impossible. Anyway, he’d taken a rather dim view of what other people chose to consider sinful. He saw it as a foolish basis for law, and it was something he chose to largely ignore, illegality be damned. Gluttony, wrath, lust, all these “sins” were fine, in Levi’s mind, provided they were not taken to extremes. So he felt no guilt, however much people might have liked a man such as himself to. When you push another down, you find yourself raised up and that, Levi supposed, was the appeal. While he understood the reason for this unsavory characteristic of humanity, he didn’t care for being the one pushed down. And love is a beautiful thing after all, who could rightly call it a sin?

Another thought stole into his mind then, that of the young bartender, charming, if clumsy, who he’d farewelled this morning in the saloon. He’d rather have stayed to converse, but the coach was due to approach the edge of town, and he couldn’t miss it, not if he intended to keep up this extravagant lifestyle that he’d come to enjoy. And not if he intended to continue giving gifts of great expense to bartenders. He’d had a pang of compassion for the boy, even before he’d seen him collide so painfully with the bar counter, which frankly could have gotten a twinge of sympathetic pain from even the hardest heart, so agonizing had it been to watch. He must admit, however, that he what he felt was a sight more than compassion.

The boy, Eren, had been clad in rough, threadbare clothes that hadn’t been of good quality even when they were new, which they certainly weren’t now, looking about two washings from falling apart. And the only person he’d really seemed to know was his employer, for whom he worked, wearing his fingers raw. There were no other Jaegers in town, Levi knew, so the kid must have been alone. He seemed awfully young to have come this far west by himself, if he did have family. An orphan perhaps? That struck a chord. Levi had been young, poor, and alone. One got used to it, of course, and the lonesomeness of such a situation faded with time, but it was never nice. It pulled Levi’s heart strings to see another alone in the world.

He couldn’t deny that the kid’s looks played a part in his interest and eagerness to be kind. Eren was just so . . . pretty. Pretty people make others want to be nice, it’s human nature, and Levi was no exception, as much dazzled by beauty as anyone else, however he might try to remain impartial. It was the boy’s eyes that did it, they were such a spectacular blend of green and gold and blue; he would have called them hazel, but for the lack of brown in his irises. They were unlike any eyes Levi had seen before. It was hideously romantic of him, but Levi felt as if those eyes, lovely as they were, were the windows to a lovely soul. A ridiculous notion, but one Levi couldn’t seem to shake, as if he were a young, sappy fool once again. Though truth be told, he couldn’t recall ever being one in the first place, his life up until now hadn’t given him many opportunities, or much reason, to be sappy. And he barely knew the kid after all. But perhaps the missed opportunities of his youth were catching up with him only now. Perhaps his time had come at last to be the fool for love. Perhaps this foolishness was simply a part of the human experience, a part that had as yet eluded him. 

Even if it was merely an inevitable experience for a man, the fluttering in his chest disconcerted him nonetheless. After all, the odds were not in his favor. But . . . well, perhaps it was wishful thinking on his part, altering his perception of events, but it seemed like Eren held some interest in Levi as well. It could be that it was merely the interest of a bored kid faced with a mysterious figure, compelling in its strangeness, but the almost constant blushing, and the way Eren’s eyes followed Levi as he moved, appeared to suggest otherwise. 

Levi couldn’t, of course, expect anything to come of it. The odds were good that, even if Eren was in that way inclined, he wouldn’t recognize it in himself. It wasn’t something the boy would have been taught about, and such a revelation could cause chaos in his heart as it rebelled, as it had would have been taught to, against his feelings. If Eren had even heard of such a thing as two men together, he would only have ever heard of it as a sin most foul, a twisted facsimile of love as God intended. Levi, with his rather nonexistent relationship with our Lord, couldn’t care less about such poisonous, ubiquitous words, but he knew nothing of Eren’s raising; the kid might very well be highly concerned with his standing with God, and as such unable to accept himself. Levi wouldn’t want to be the cause of such mental conflict. He would not initiate anything. But if something did happen between them . . . If Eren were to undeniably indicate interest, Levi saw no reason to deprive the two of them of that pleasure. So long as they remained discreet. Levi would hate to be lynched.

The coach had gone on, and the dust had entirely settled, so it was time for Levi to return to town. Perhaps he’d partake of a drink and a meal in the saloon. Eren would probably be minding the bar when he arrived. Yes, Levi would most definitely have a whiskey.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First, I wanna say thanks to all of you for reading and for all the kudos and comments I've received, and I want to apologize for the delay in this update. I was out of town and away from my laptop for a while, which threw off my groove and slowed me down.  
> Anyway, Eren isn't the only one crushing, even if he may be much less self-aware about it than Levi . . .


	4. We All Have Secrets

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Levi isn't the only one with a past to hide.

Eren waited impatiently for Levi to return and save him from the mind-numbing monotony of refilling the same glasses of the same few drunks, and wiping spills off of the same counter as he always did, day after day. He looked up expectantly, more excited than he’d readily admit at the prospect of seeing his new acquaintance, or perhaps friend; he’d like to think they were friendly. But his excitement flagged as each opening of the door revealed yet another regular bar fly, or a person just off the coach, passing through and in need of a meal. The saloon door didn’t swing open to reveal the awaited Levi until the early evening. 

The bar had mostly emptied out already and Eren’s boredom consumed him, such that he found himself resting the side of his face upon the freshly wiped countertop, the rough wood grain leaving an imprint on his cheek, though it went unnoticed by Eren. His eyes glazed over dully and his head lolled, feeling as though his brain were dripping out of his ears due to lack of use, wishing that at least, if Levi wasn’t coming back that evening, he might be allowed to close up and go to bed early. Some hope; Mr. Campbell would no doubt give him a Look if he were to suggest such a thing, being the type of man to hold out until the very last possible opportunity for customers had passed, patient to a fault. That fault being the time cutting into Eren’s hours of sleep, but Eren still didn’t fancy being on the receiving end of one of his boss’s Looks. 

When he at last heard the creak of hinges paired with the sound of high quality boots on wood, Eren sat bolt upright, at attention, eyes fixed upon the doorway where he could see Levi Ackerman, slightly dusty and looking a bit put off, stepping over the threshold. Levi’s eyes scanned the room, settling upon Eren where he stood behind the bar, and Levi strode over to take the seat in front of him. Eren couldn’t help but feel a little warm tingle of selfish pleasure when he saw the stony face of the highwayman relax into an expression verging on a smile as he caught Eren’s gaze, relaxing at the sight of Eren himself. He hadn’t felt special at all to anyone in a long time, since before he’d left home, and he had to admit that he was more than a little pleased to be the person who made Levi smile, to be unique, special to him, in that way. He was probably being a bit full of himself, he knew, his perception reflecting his own thoughts more than reality, but it still felt nice.

Eren watched as Levi sat down, somehow managing to incorporate a sort of feline grace into a typically inelegant movement. Even as he hopped up a bit to seat himself comfortably on a stool far too tall for him, he didn’t look silly at all; rather, he looked so confident in himself that Eren got the impression that the stool was being silly, for having the gall to be too tall for Levi. 

“A whiskey, sir?” Eren asked, happy to be able to offer one of the few things that he knew Levi liked.

Levi nodded, smiling gently, and Eren felt his face heat up a bit at the sight, so he turned away quickly to pour out a glass of the house best, embarrassed of the blush that was surely staining his cheeks. He did his best to get his face under control, cursing how his face was practically an open book to everything he meant to hide, before turning back to Levi, a slightly wobbly smile plastered across his unnaturally stiff face. Well dammit, he was trying. 

This was met with a raised eyebrow from the man across the counter as he reached out with an elegant hand to take hold of the glass.

“You alright there?” he asked, brow still raised questioningly.

“Wha- yes, I’m fine, why do you ask?” Eren stumbled over his reply, and as he felt his cheeks flush once again, he realized that Levi’s brow had not lowered, and it was pretty obvious what had prompted the question. That being Eren making himself look idiotic.

Before he could say anything to cover up his conversational blunder, Levi uttered a phrase that had sudden surge of embarrassed panic rise in his chest.

“You’ve got a little something on your face,” Levi pointed out, gesturing to Eren’s left cheek.

“Oh shit, what is it?” Eren gasped, both hands flying up to feel his face, rubbing both palms furiously over his cheeks.

“Well,” Levi said, an amused expression blooming on his face, “it looks an awful lot like an imprint of woodgrain. Don’t tell me you spent the afternoon passed out on the counter?”

Levi’s voice was teasing, but friendly, so Eren didn’t take it too hard. And he had kinda passed out, at least mentally, with his face squished into the grain of the counter. He wasn’t going to admit it though, so he brushed off Levi’s remarks with a mumble and eyes darting elsewhere, focusing on anything but Levi’s smug face as he did his best to rub the imprint off of his face.

When he drummed up the courage to look back again, he was mildly surprised to see Levi’s eyes upon him, uncomfortably serious, searching Eren’s face for something. Perhaps he was worrying that he’d offended Eren. He shot Levi a beaming smile, so show that he hadn’t minded, and Levi relaxed in turn, bringing his glass back to his lips and taking a sip, holding the liquid in his mouth to savor it before swallowing. Eren realized he had been watching the bob of Levi’s adam’s apple as he swallowed far too closely to innocently explain, and his eyes darted away again, but he had a sinking feeling that Levi had seen it clearly. If he had, he didn’t seem to mind, much to Eren’s relief. 

They stayed late in the bar that night, just chatting casually. Eren hadn’t realized how much he missed just talking with someone with no real purpose in mind, not communicating to get a job done, but just for the sake of companionship. They gossiped about people in town, laughing about the resident busybody, Mrs. Lancaster. Levi chuckled behind his hand as Eren filled him in on her recent nonsense, writing “anonymous” letters to people about their moral decay, letters that only she thought were anonymous. Everyone knew it was her, and no one gave a rat’s ass. 

Eren tried to update Levi on the news around town, since he’d been away for so long. Most of the recent events Levi listened to with the occasional nod or smile when conversation warranted it, but when Eren mentioned the new preacher in town, Levi went a bit quiet. Eren couldn’t be totally sure why.

Truth be told, Eren himself got a bit of an uneasy feeling from the preacher. It wasn’t just his lack of inclination towards a devoutly religious life, there was something else. The man had a fervor to the way he spoke, an enthusiasm for talking about hellfire and brimstone that Eren, if he didn’t know better, might have called insanity. He hadn’t really done anything per say, to make Eren so uneasy, he’d never even glanced Eren’s way in church, he probably didn’t even know that Eren existed, but the feeling remained, encouraging Eren to actively avoid the man’s eye. Perhaps he was being silly, but he felt much better out of the church than in it. Even one step over the threshold out into daylight was enough to make him breathe a sigh of relief. Perhaps Levi had a similar feeling. 

Eren didn’t ask though, not wanting to ruin the comfortable mood they had going, and moved on to other topics instead: the impending railroad into town, Eren’s idea for a new type of sandwich they could serve at the saloon, and Eren’s displeasure when Mr. Campbell shot that idea down. Levi chuckled again at Eren’s pout, saying that he’d try Eren’s sandwich invention if he’d make one, though Levi wasn’t altogether sure that peanut butter should ever go anywhere near roast beef. 

Eren got the definite feeling that Levi didn’t actually want one of Eren’s sandwiches, but that he just said he’d try it to be nice. Eren didn’t really mind if Levi had only said it to be nice, he was happy enough with the thought that Levi cared enough about how he felt to support his idea. After all, Eren did seem to be the only person in the known universe who liked his admittedly avant-garde recipes. He grinned at Levi, conscious of the happy tickle in his chest, and unable to care if it showed. 

“So,” Eren began, changing the subject, “Where are you from Levi? How did you come to be in this dusty little town? If you don’t mind my saying, you seem a bit too sophisticated to have come from another ass-end-of-nowhere town like here.”

Levi glanced away a bit hesitantly, looking back down to his now empty glass, and rolling it in his fingers before speaking. “I’m from … around. A lot of places, really, none of them exactly home.” He met Eren’s eyes again, the smile on his face bright but a bit brittle as he went on, “I’m too much of a nomadic type to stay anywhere long enough to make a home.”

“Oh . . .” Eren felt he should respond, but he couldn’t be sure what to say. Levi didn’t seem to want to talk about himself much, and “home” seemed to be a sore spot for him. Eren wanted to know more, but he was pretty sure asking wouldn’t be welcome right now. 

Levi saved him the trouble of having to think of a different place to take their conversation.

“What about you, Eren? Where are you from?”

“Oh, I’m from New Orleans.”

Levi looked at him curiously and remarked, “You don’t seem to have much of an accent though.”

“Oh, no,” Eren clarified, “my folks were both from up north. They taught me to speak without an accent. And well,” he went on, “I didn’t really get along with the other kids, didn’t talk much with them, so I never got the opportunity to pick up the local way of talking.”

“Didn’t get along?”

“Uh yeah,” Eren glanced down to where his fingers had been mindlessly tapping at the countertop, “I fought. A lot.”

“Ha!” Levi barked out a sound of amusement. “I can see that.”

“What?”

“Nothing, just you seem the type. A born fighter. No judgement, I can appreciate a little viciousness in a man.”

Eren didn’t really know what to do with that. Was Levi drunk? Eren genuinely couldn’t remember how many drinks he’d served him already. He probably should have been keeping track of that. 

Levi gestured to Eren’s bare forearms where he’d rolled up his sleeves to clean. They were covered in dozens of tiny nicks, not too noticeable, but evident to the close observer. Levi’s eyes were sharp.

“Those from fighting?” He asked. Rolling up his own sleeves, Levi showed his own scars littering his arms. Seeing Eren’s surprised expression, and apparently assuming it was because of his own scars, Levi explained, “Knife fights. Too many to count. Yours from fights too? How’d the other guy look after? Black and blue and regretting his decision to mess with you?” Levi’s grin slipped from his face.

“Did I say something wrong?” Levi asked, looking genuinely concerned.

“No,” Eren shook his head, “It’s fine, it’s just that that’s not what they’re from.”

“Oh,” Levi looked a bit awkward, like someone unaccustomed to making mistakes, let alone owning them. “Sorry,” he said, looking down at Eren’s hands where they uncomfortably, stiffly, clutched the countertop.

Silence bloomed between them, uncomfortable and stifling.

Eren kept his eyes cast downward, even as Levi eventually raised his, not sure how to meet Levi’s eyes, lest the man somehow read his eyes and discover what it was that had given Eren those scars, what it was that had driven him west, what it was that filled him with enough guilt to brave the discomfort of a hard wooden pew in the church. The thing that he knew would someday catch up to him, however far west he might run. 

He told others, and tried to tell himself, that he left had home to make his own place in the world, to get away from his family and their influence over him, but that wasn’t it, and he knew it. An all too familiar anxiety rose in his chest. He really liked being around Levi, but . . . well . . .

Levi might be a highwayman, but Eren couldn’t be sure he’d accept the company of a murderer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry I've taken so long to update, I've been working on commissions, as well as moving houses twice. The next update will come a lot faster, and it will have actual graphic violence in it, letting y'all know.  
> Also, I mentioned the new preacher and the busybody Mrs. Lancaster for a reason. Shit is gonna go down.  
> Yeah, from here on out things are gonna happen that justify the 'explicit' rating on this fic.


	5. Night Terrors

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eren's past haunts him in his sleep, a life he's done his best to leave behind. The persona he's built of himself shakes under the weight of his memories.

If it had been only the one, only the once, it might have been okay. 

He could be someone else in the daylight, detached from it all, as if the memory belonged to someone else, but sometimes Eren would close his eyes in slumber and his inner eyes would open upon the scene: a bloody floor, crimson soaking into the wooden planks, staining it permanently a gruesome reddish brown. He is seven years old again in his dream, holding a kitchen knife the glistens red in the dull light coming in through the dirty window above his head.

A scared girl huddles in the corner. She had been scared before, kidnapped from her family now dead, restrained and waiting for her uncertain fate to come to her, but now there was another look on her face, one of sheer terror. He couldn’t understand why she was looking at him like that. He had helped her, hadn’t he? She had seen him plunge the knife into the man’s chest over and over again until it was just a bloody pulp beneath the blade and Eren’s flailing fist. Shouldn’t that be a comfort to her? She could be absolutely sure her captor was dead, so why did she look more afraid now?

When he advanced on her, she scrabbled at the floorboards with her tied hands, broken and torn nails leaving marks on the wood.

“Shhh, shhh,” he hushed her, “It’s okay.”

Why didn’t she understand? She still shrank back against the wall, tears flowing from eyes that were wide open in fear. As he raised the knife, a muffled scream escaped her mouth, stifled by a piece of cloth acting as a gag, placed there by her kidnapper. 

“Shhh, shhh.”

He cut her free of her bonds, the rope and the cloth gag falling from her wrists and mouth onto the floor. She shook like a leaf fluttering in a gale, mouthing words in such a tiny voice that Eren couldn’t understand.

“What?”

“There were three of them.”

Eren’s eyes went wide to match hers. As her words faded into the deathly still air around them, Eren heard a noise from behind him. The others had arrived. Perfect timing.

The first one through the door walked right into Eren’s knife. Four or five times. Eren wasn’t keeping track, he just stabbed whatever was there. He saw everything in red, but whether that was a manifestation of his own murderous rage, or whether everything had indeed gone red, covered in the blood of these evil men, he couldn’t tell. The man collapsed under his onslaught, but he kept going, single-mindedly shredding all the flesh he could reach, and in his state of narrowed vision, he didn’t see the third kidnapper come up behind him.

The first he knew of the third man was an arm around his neck, squeezing and lifting him up, his short, light frame dangling from the man’s muscled arms by his throat. Eren gasped for breath, struggling with all his might, but for all his efforts, he was still a child and he couldn’t beat the strength of a full grown man, let alone this mountain of muscle and bone. 

He bit at what part of the arm choking him he could reach, teeth sinking into the flesh, pinpricks of blood welling out of the places where his canines pierced the skin, but the arm around him only tightened, and he could feel his vision beginning to go hazy as he fought to breathe. 

“The knife!” He gasped at the girl, who still sat on the floor, frozen in terror, watching Eren as the life was squeezed from him.

She looked at him blankly, and he despaired, his arms going up behind his head, above his captor’s grip on his throat, trying to gouge the man’s eyes with his dirty fingernails, but his ten-year-old arms were too damn short. He could only grasp at the air wildly.

Eren could tell there was only a breath or two left in him before he lost consciousness, could no longer fight, and would surely die. He fixed his eyes again upon the girl, staring directly into her own eyes.

With all the strength, all the breath, all the fighting spirit he could gather, he tried to shout to her again, the words coming out as more of a wheeze, “Fight! Fight or die!”

Something changed in her. Eren watched it happen. It was as if something broke. Whatever social conditioning, whatever fear, whatever was holding her back shattered, and she moved with determination, wrenching Eren’s knife from where it was still lodged in the body of the man on the floor, and charging at the man holding Eren.  
She took him down with a slash to the leg, severing the tendon and muscle holding him upright, and he came down hard, releasing Eren as he screamed in pain. Eren watched her, as his chest heaved, drawing as much air as he could get into his starved lungs. She didn’t stop. Not when the man screamed, not when the man died, she kept on until she grew too tired to continue, dropping the knife from her bloodied hand onto the stained floorboards with a thump.

She looked over to Eren and as their eyes met, something beyond words was exchanged between them. In her eyes, Eren could see the same gleam, the joy and the madness, the light that lived in his own eyes. From that moment, they were tied by blood, even if it wasn’t their own blood.

Eren’s father found them there, in an abandoned shed, sitting silently with three corpses. He had made it all go away, and the girl became Eren’s sister. 

The girl, Eren’s new sister, was named Mikasa. Her parents had been Japanese immigrants, some of the first, come to the U.S. as their isolationist country began to open its borders and promote Westernization; a lovely couple with a lovely daughter. 

They weren’t exactly welcomed in New Orleans; as the only Japanese family in town, they were met with their fair share of ignorant prejudice, but they got on well enough. They’d arrived with enough money that no one was downright cruel to them. To be cruel meant that the force that a bit of money can buy might be turned against you. Money was influence, and influence was to be respected. 

Eren’s father was a doctor, a good one, second only to the clergy in terms of respectability, from a respected family, old money people, though that old money had dwindled significantly over the last couple generations. His mother had been a governess, the daughter of another old money family who’d been reduced to something more lower-middle class. But the Jaegers were considered beyond reproach, of the upmost moral fiber, a paragon of integrity. This reputation had mostly to do with their family history, but carefully strategized social appearances, Dr. Jaeger’s treatment of high class patients and the associated connections, and charity work solidified their standing among the cream of New Orleans society. They were comfortable and well-regarded, but not rich.

Dr. Jaeger looked after Mikasa, along with his other patients, as the girl had a tendency to be sickly, with a weak immune system in a new country full of new illnesses. He had taken Eren with him that day to carry supplies as he went around for Mikasa’s checkup, to make sure that she would recover from a recent infection. The parents had been dead when they’d arrived, and the daughter was nowhere to be seen.

Eren’s father had run off to find a police officer, but Eren, with his short legs, couldn’t keep up, so he’d been told instead to wait, because the police would be there in a few minutes. Eren had intended to wait, he had, but he saw, in the muck in the small lane behind the house, footprints and the tracks of the wheels of a cart. They’d taken Mikasa away, that way. 

Without thinking very much about the possible consequences, he’d taken off as fast as his skinny little legs could carry him, following the tracks of the cart. 

He’d found them in a tiny ramshackle shed that seemed to be abandoned, and not ten minutes later, he was up to his elbows in the blood of another person. 

His father had made it go away. He’d swept the house of the traces of the two children and sent them off back to the Jaeger residence in clean clothes, their bloodied ones abandoned along with a butchery’s refuse, where they were unlikely to be found, and even less likely to be connected to the Jaeger boy and his father’s patient. Then he’d called the police to lead them to the shed, recruiting a couple officers from the crime scene at the house.

A seven-year-old boy and a nine-year-old girl were likely to get away with such a crime in court, a murder in self-defense, but it wasn’t a guarantee. Now, after Dr. Jaeger had done his best, their safety and freedom were assured. But he never spoke about it. To either of the children. He never even admitted that he knew what had gone down in there, never said a thing. 

But he looked at his son differently after that. Coldly. Suspiciously. He had seen the bodies, he had seen the bloody pulp the men had been reduced to, and he knew it had been Eren. He probably suspected Mikasa too, but he knew Eren had killed men. And not just one. Eren saw it in his father’s eyes every time he looked at him. 

His mother must have noticed too. She’d washed the last traces of blood out of Eren’s hair, and she must have known it wasn’t his. But she never said anything either. She didn’t look at him quite like his father did, but she went awfully quiet, and she stayed that way. She didn’t smile at her son like she had before.

He hadn’t just stabbed the once, and he hadn’t killed just the one man. And Mikasa only killed once he’d told her to. It was on him. The silence that grew in his house was on him.

If it had been just the one, just once, Eren kept thinking, maybe it would have been okay. He had been a child, and he hadn’t understood what his actions meant; he hadn’t understood how frightening he was.

His parents became strangers to him, and they’d always been strange to Mikasa, but Eren and Mikasa were not strangers. They were tied close, so close, and they kept almost exclusively to themselves. Mikasa learned English in Eren’s accent and Eren learned a bit of Japanese in hers; the languages mingled between them until they spoke is some sort of strange dialect trapped between the two. But the other children at their school could tell that they were odd, and speaking a language all their own only made them more so. 

They only let one other child into their little world, a boy called Armin. He was clever, clever enough to learn Eren and Mikasa’s language, clever enough to make them trust him. He was an outsider like them, clever enough to make the other children envious and angry, ostracized by his classmates, and therefore he was one of Eren and Mikasa’s kind. 

Armin would surely have been called a genius if he’d come from a richer family, but as he was, he was only seen as getting a bit above himself. Intelligence was the domain of the upper classes; god forbid the poor not be stupid. He was an orphan as far as anyone, including himself, knew. His parents had gone on a boat trip and never returned, presumed drowned. Armin had a grandfather, but the man was old and ailing and the money was wearing thin. 

When the choice came to pursue a higher education, all three of them declined, educating themselves instead from books at home. They’d likely learn more of use that way, without the continued derision of other students, and that way, they could be sure they’d all stay together. Eren hadn’t really stuck with the schooling though. He wasn’t great with books and got bored all too easily. 

As they grew, the three remained fast friends, but it became apparent that Mikasa and Armin had come to love each other in a way beyond friendship, beyond family. Eren didn’t mind, he couldn’t think of anyone else who could be deserving of his sister, and he happily gave Armin his blessing. 

The night Armin proposed, Mikasa and Eren took him aside and told him their shared secret. If Armin was to join Mikasa in holy wedlock, he ought to know. Mikasa had looked on the verge of tears in the quiet after they told their story, eyes teary for the first time since that bloody day, and Eren could feel his heart in his throat. But they needn’t have worried. Armin had known. He was too clever not to. And he loved them anyway, loved Mikasa anyway, and he had married her in the church, and Eren had thrown rice over them as they left the building, wishing them well as they climbed into a coach that would take them away on their honeymoon. 

They had come home to New Orleans happier than Eren had ever seen them. Armin had become a tradesman, dealing in treasures, luxuries from Japan that had become so very popular, and with Mikasa’s assistance, he had become a very wealthy man with an impeccable reputation. He had purchased a lovely house to raise a family in, and they had invited Eren to stay. They didn’t say why, but Eren knew. They were saving him from the oppressive silence of his childhood home. And they were keeping an eye on him.

Whatever had snapped in him to make him enraged enough to kill and mutilate three men had never truly healed. Mikasa had learned to clamp down on her emotions, to be in control, but Eren hadn’t. He just hadn’t. He tried. But he didn’t get much better.

Instead he tried to avoid stress, to avoid other people as much as possible, because he knew that if he lost control, he wouldn’t be able to get it back. He became a recluse even as Mikasa and Armin became social butterflies. But it was better being a recluse in their house than that of his parents. From the day he left, they never visited, never sent even one letter. Eren didn’t know what else he could have expected, but it still hurt. 

Mikasa and Armin did their best to make him feel included, welcome in their shared home, but Eren couldn’t help but feel as though he was intruding. They were a newly married couple after all. He couldn’t help but think that the brother of the bride in the house would, well, put a bit of a damper on things. 

The anxiety increased as he became a little older and began to understand what it was to feel attraction to another person, physical or romantic. It scared him, not just because thinking of other people that way was, as a reclusive individual, so foreign to him, but because he found the objects of such thoughts to be men much more often than women. 

Maybe Mikasa and Armin noticed the way his eyes followed the attractive young men who danced in their ballroom during the various functions they hosted. He tried not to do it at all, but that was harder said than done, so he had to settle for trying to be subtle. But maybe his little family had noticed; he was almost certain they had, for Eren could feel them watching him more than ever before. Not like his parents had, with hollow eyes, but with expressions of concern. His feelings could land him in trouble, even prison, if he didn’t keep them in check, and keeping his feelings in check had never been his strong suit, so they kept a quiet eye on him. But they never talked about it. Like his parents had never talked about it.

Were his feelings even less forgivable than murder? Maybe they were, but Eren couldn’t really understand how. But perhaps Armin and Mikasa’s silence was not born of a discomfort with the subject, not of disgust, but with concern for the fallout if they should ever be overheard. They were always looking out for him, they always had.

He wondered sometimes if his parents had known, even before he himself had, and that’s why they’d remained so stony even as he grew. He brushed the thought off as improbable, nigh ridiculous, every time it came into his head, but he still wondered, in the back of his mind. It didn’t matter now anyway. He was dead to them, it was evident even if they’d never voiced it, and they were but strangers to him.

His chest ached and the pressure grew, as things unsaid, things that couldn’t be said, accumulated, weighing heavy on Eren’s mind. 

He tried so hard to be subtle in his affections and attentions, to hide his nature, but he wasn’t good enough at it, and Mikasa and Armin couldn’t protect him from everything. Some people had noticed, a military man of his own age, the son of some member of the gentry, had seen him at one of the ballroom parties and had put two and two together. He’d gathered his cronies one night, a group of belligerent, violent fools, and they came for Eren. 

When the men stepped out of the dark to surround him, Eren felt he should have known not to leave the house. He’d meant to go for a walk, to give the married couple a bit of space, but he’d walked right into an ambush. He was sure they were gonna kill him, he could see it in their postures, in their eyes; they wanted blood, and they would take Eren’s. When the first fist made contact with his cheek, the repressed rage of many years was released, and Eren saw red once again. 

When he came back into himself, as if regaining consciousness, three men were unconscious and bloody, some of their bones clearly broken, and the ringleader of the group, the first to hit Eren, was very, very dead, his face now just a mess of flesh and shattered cartilage and bone. Eren himself was covered in nicks and cuts, some of which with broken glass stuck in them. He had no idea when he’d been hit, and he had no idea with which, even as he began to pull shards of glass from his flesh, his stomach flipping in stress, pain, and horror.

Eren was sick onto the ground. Wiping his mouth on a blood spattered sleeve, he steeled himself to look back at the carnage. Three injured and unconscious, one dead . . . but there had been five men surrounding him, not four. One must have escaped. Eren was going to hang for murder this time, there was no way he could get away with it, no way he could cover this up, not when there was a survivor, not when the victims were men of influence. The surviving man had probably gone to the law already. Eren didn’t have long. 

If it had only been the once, only the one, it might have been alright. But it hadn’t. He was an adult in the eyes of the law, and he understood exactly what his actions meant. He understood how truly terrifying he was.

He could never forget the expression on Mikasa and Armin’s faces when he’d run back into the house, bloody, clothes torn, with a feral look in his eyes. They must have known they couldn’t save him this time. 

Mikasa had gotten enough out of him to understand that he had murdered people, that he had lost one, and that the law would be coming for him any minute. Mikasa and Armin, his friends, his family, the truest family he’d ever had, helped him change and wash the blood off, and packed him a bag. It was just a change of clothes and some food, but time was of the essence, and they couldn’t take the time to do more. 

They didn’t see him to the door. He left via a window on the back of the house and ran off into the dense humidity of the swampy woods. 

He kept running, sure that the law, that wanted posters bearing his name and face, were close on his trail. He rode the rails in a train car, then hitched a ride on a wagon, then continued again on foot, growing dirty and tired, taking any little job he could get so he could eat, until one day he found himself on the outskirts of a dusty town in the ass-end of nowhere, somewhere in Nevada. There wasn’t a railroad into town, only one small trail for horses and wagons. It was totally isolated and it was perfect.

He’d found a small stream outside of town, more of a trickle running through a ditch really, and gave himself and his clothes a good wash, at least the best he could manage, and cut his hair with the knife from his pack. It was a terrible job, a bit too short, and it probably made him look like a dumb yokel. He’d gotten very thin too, bony, on his way west. He was unrecognizable from his former self. Excellent. 

Having made himself as presentable as he could, Eren strode into town, where he encountered a saloon with a “help wanted” sign in the window. He walked in through the saloon door, into a new identity and a new life. He’d gotten used to it, to this new persona, and it became second nature after a while. He found himself forgetting the faces of people he’d known, the things he’d read in books, the color of his bedroom walls back home. He really became the country bumpkin he’d presented himself as to everyone in town, on the surface anyway. In the daylight, he could truly believe his own lie.

But his new life didn’t erase his old one, at least not in the depths of his own head in the night, and he dreamed of blood and screaming and angry mobs most nights.  
After that night in the bar, after his chat with Levi had brought attention to the scars from the broken glass, the night terrors were more vivid than they had been in a long time. He could feel the hot blood on his hands, the hot blood flowing out of the gashes in his own skin, the blood clotting and drying in his tangled hair … The person he'd made of himself, his illusion, shook, his sense of self decaying. The truth he'd been keeping from himself, that he'd worked so hard to deny, hit him like a brick to the face.

He woke up screaming.

And on the other side of the wall, so did Levi. Eren wasn’t the only one who saw blood in their sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well that was a sudden tone shift. Eren's got serious issues, however good he's gotten at pretending they don't exist.
> 
> But we do need some angst don't we, so that Eren and Levi can have a real emotional heart to heart when they finally get around to smooching. Which is coming up soon btw. Eren has truly terrible impulse control, and it's not just limited to his violent tendencies; he's also got a raging boner for tiny dark-haired highwaymen.
> 
> I actually had no solid idea of what I was doing when I wrote this chapter, just a series of vague ideas, and this is a pretty big shift from the previous chapters, so I'd really appreciate your feedback :)


	6. We've All Done Terrible Things

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Levi wakes from a dream of his own past to the sound of Eren screaming, and comes running to help. The Eren he finds is not the one he's met before, and it raises some questions in Levi's mind, but he can't help but feel that he and Eren have a deeper connection than he might have thought.

In Levi’s dreams, he too was a scared child, but the blood he saw in his sleep wasn’t the blood of violence, but of illness, something far more terrifying, for the helplessness of those facing it. 

He watched his mother as she darned his worn and shredded clothes, humming to herself in a voice that grew fainter and rougher by the day, smiling a smile that grew more wan and tired with each night that passed. 

She had started coughing one day, and she didn’t get better. She told Levi not to worry, and he tried not to, because she’d asked him to, but one day she took the scrap of cloth she used as a handkerchief away from her face after a bout of coughing and Levi could see that it was stained red. 

It kept getting worse, and there was no doctor to go to, they couldn’t possibly afford one, even if they could find a doctor open-minded enough to treat a woman of Levi’s mother’s profession. Levi watched his mother cough up her lungs a piece at a time, growing paler and paler, thinner and thinner, turning to a skeleton before his eyes. Her cheeks became sunken, her eyes dull, and her hair brittle and thin. 

She kept working through it, to keep her baby fed, but it took an even greater toll than it had before she became ill, and eventually she just couldn’t go on with it. She’d hung on for years, kept functioning by some sheer force of will, but this wasn’t something you could make disappear by ignoring it, and not even she could ignore it forever. No amount of determination or desperation could make it better.

She went to bed one night and couldn’t get up again in the morning; she was just too weak. Levi remembered clutching her sleeve with dirty hands, wrapping an arm around her back, trying to haul her upright, trying to get her to eat, but she couldn’t do either. He dribbled water in between her cracking lips, and her eyelids fluttered, but she couldn’t see him, not anymore. She smiled though, as best as she could, and whispered to him that she loved him. She still called him her baby. His heart twisted in his chest and rose in his throat, but he smiled for her, even if she couldn’t see it. He didn’t trust himself not to cry if he spoke.

That was the first time he went out and fought in the ring. He’d come home after almost as bloody as his mother’s handkerchief, but he’d won, and, having taken the risk of placing the largest amount of cash he could scrape together in a hefty bet on himself, he’d come away with a lot of money, or at least what qualified to him as a lot of money; he’d never seen much cash himself. He’d cleaned himself up at home, put on his nicest clothes, and gone out again with his winnings, pressing a gentle kiss to his mother’s grey, cold cheek as he left. 

An hour and a small bribe to a bouncer later, Levi sat at a table in a betting parlor, seated next to men he’d seen before. At least one of them had paid for his mother’s services, and then turned right around and denounced her, treating her like garbage as if he were so clean. He’d left her with bruises. Levi remembered. He steeled himself, not letting the rage show on his face. Revenge would come in another form, not violence, but something far more hurtful. Wouldn’t it be ever so sweet to make this man poor?

It was funny, it seemed as though none of them recognized him here, with a clean face and shirt. They might have recognized him outside, but in here, they were so certain they’d never run into a street urchin like Levi, that they took one look at him and assumed he must be some other boy named Levi with a similar haircut. Some sort of coincidence, surely.

People see what they expect to see, and none of these people ever expected Levi Ackerman to ever join them at a table. 

Levi had an advantage, even if he’d never played in a parlor like this before, just games with toughs on the street. He’d been watching all these people for years, watching them as they passed him and his mother on the street, pointedly diverting their eyes from the ‘whore’ and her son. He knew them, knew their dirty little secrets, knew the way they thought. His light fingers had come to intimately know the contents of their pockets and wallets, he’d cased their houses, taken the occasional unmissed thing. And they couldn’t even remember so much as Levi’s face.

He was gonna take them for all they were worth. And he did. He barely even had to cheat! It came so easy to him.

He spent weeks going from parlor to parlor, accumulating cash at a rapid rate, enough that, for the first time in his life, he had reason to open a bank account. Cheating became easier as he got better at it, and as all guilt he may have felt vanished under the desire to part these people with their money, and the joy of their money becoming his. He didn’t win every time of course. He had to lose just often enough that he couldn’t be proven to be cheating, but he made sure to win enough to make a few choice gentlemen squirm in the grip of financial distress. 

He could finally pay to get his mother seen by a doctor. The man had been reluctant, but anyone can be bribed, everyone's got a price. Levi had gotten the news he’d been expecting, thought it hurt him to hear it. His mother was going to die very soon; she’d been dying for months now, her fate sealed years ago, and the doctor couldn’t do much more than give Levi an elixir that would make her more comfortable; even under threat of violence in the form of Levi’s fist, it was all the man could do. 

And so Levi kept her comfortable. He moved the two of them into a room in a nice hotel, with a plush bed and a mountain of fluffy pillows for his mother to lie upon, and room service to bring them food. He didn’t leave her side any more than he had to. He wanted to be there at the end; he didn’t want her to die alone.

Only a week later, he’d held her hand as she breathed her last, and he’d sat up with her body all night as it went cold. He’d heard that it’s what you’re supposed to do, to help the deceased let go and leave this world. He wasn’t sure that was true, but on the off chance that it was, he wanted to give his mother the best passing she could have. If heaven was real, he was sure she was headed there. And if, as others loved to say, heaven wouldn’t accept a woman like Levi’s mother, then it was heaven’s loss, and heaven was a shit hole anyway. She deserved to sit upon a cloud with harp music and whatever else was theoretically waiting for the pure of heart after death. It was the least the universe owed her after the shit she’d had to live through.

At the funeral, he had to restrain himself from strangling every last person who came up to offer him their condolences. They had been happy to spit on his mother while she lived; any sympathy now was too little too late even if it were genuine, and Levi could be certain that it was not. He didn’t care a whit about being polite, these people had done nothing in their lives to deserve Levi’s deference, and he had no intention of letting them leave here still unaware of his loathing. 

The man he’d seen that first time at the betting parlor, the one he remembered leaving bruises on his mother’s skin, tried to pat him on the shoulder. Levi had punched him in the face, enraged like he’d never been before, a cold sort of rage, so cold that it burned. 

And in the morning, the man was found dead in his home, his safe emptied. Foul play, the police determined. Levi couldn’t be connected to it, at least not in the preliminary investigation.

Taking the man’s money hadn’t been enough in the end. An eye for an eye, a life for a life, as they say.

Levi felt no regret.

He’d left that night, taking nothing but the clothes on his back and a thick wad of cash, and he’d never looked back. There wasn’t much to look back upon; he hadn’t had the time to build up any memories other than those shared with his mother. He was only sixteen. 

Over the next few months, he transformed himself. He gained a taste for silk and satin, for champagne and sweets, for goose down pillows and gold pocket watches. He reveled in the feel of clean skin, lying back into the perfumed waters of a claw-foot bathtub in a luxurious hotel room, a cleanliness he’d never felt in the hovel he’d called home, without so much as a tin pail to bathe from. It was a novelty, he found, to be healthy. He hadn’t realized it, since it had been all he knew, but Levi had never not been ill. He’d been starving, or feverish, or dehydrated, or injured every day of his life up until then. 

The longer he went, the more he realized he could have lived this life a lot sooner if only he’d been less honest, if he’d gone for the bigger, more profitable crimes right off. Fuck honesty and integrity, he’d rather have a full stomach and soft sheets to sleep on. He’d rather his mother had gotten to enjoy life before she began to waste away. That’s what he regretted, the only thing he regretted. He could have given her that. But he hadn’t. 

Objectively, he knew that he’d been a child, that he couldn’t have pulled off back then the things that he could now, but it didn’t make him feel any better. 

He became bolder, graduating from mostly cheating at cards and petty theft to habitual robbery, and loving every second of it. Life was short, harsh, and violent. He’d get the best out of it he could. Sure he was bitter, but there was something so very satisfying in wiping the well-bred smiles off the faces of the upper classes, even as he himself became rich enough to blend into their company. A young, handsome, well-to-do gentlemen could get away with all manner of things; wearing the right clothes and with the right way of speaking, he was above suspicion.

A botched robbery however, one day drove him out into the wilderness to escape the law, where he’d found a dusty backwater town that was quiet, isolated, and oddly picturesque. He’d found his base of operations, a place to come back to after working a job in a bigger town or along a coach route, a place where he could spend his ill-gotten gains to the benefit of the poor. Well, mostly for his own benefit, but he could feel just a bit more justified if the money went to people who could really use it. The town was so ugly it was sweet, and he liked it there. A decade passed in relative peace, or at least what a career criminal like Levi could consider peaceful. Anyway, he didn’t get caught, not by anyone he couldn’t easily escape from.

And one day, upon returning from a rigged poker game with enough to buy a mansion or two, Levi had found a beautiful boy with beautiful eyes, and their sparkle awoke something in him. Sincerity. He couldn’t explain why, but he saw something in the kid that made him sincerely care, as he hadn’t really cared about anyone else since his mother died. Something in himself that he’d long thought dead breathed life again. It was stupid that some kid he'd just met could bring this out in him, but it felt pretty nice to care again after so many years.

And one night, he woke to the sound of that beautiful boy screaming as if in fear for his life.

Levi was startled out of sleep by the noise, his mother’s bloody handkerchief fading into the back of his mind as the here and now replaced the past in the forefront of his mind. After a moment of sleepy confusion, Levi flipped back the covers and jumped out of bed, yanking the door of his room open and running to Eren’s room. The door was closed, so he banged on the rough wood, calling to Eren on the other side, panic welling up in his chest as Eren didn’t answer, but continued screaming. Levi tried the knob and found the door unlocked, so he threw it open and hurled himself into the room.

It was only then that the thought occurred that if Eren really was being attacked, Levi jumping in wearing only long underwear, unarmed, was not the best of plans. But, mercifully, there wasn’t anyone in the room, except for himself and Eren, who lay curled up in the middle of his mattress, hands tearing at his hair, mouth open in a shriek of terror. 

Levi rushed over to the bed.

“Eren? Hey, hey, Eren? It’s okay, you’re okay, wake up, kid, it was only a dream,” Levi said, gently reaching to pull Eren’s hands away from his hair, holding them in his own hands. 

The physical contact seemed to pull Eren out of whatever place in his head he’d been trapped in, and he rolled over to look at Levi with red, teary eyes, chest still heaving with panicked breaths. Levi watched as Eren’s eyes focused, the glazed look fading as he properly woke up. Eren looked down to where Levi still held his hands, and he looked back up at Levi’s face with wide, uncomprehending eyes, but he didn’t move to pull away. 

Eren stared at Levi for a moment, the prolonged serious eye contact beginning to make Levi a little nervous, then his eyes closed again and his face twisted, tears streaming out between long lashes that stuck together in clumps from the moisture. Levi just stared awkwardly for a moment, still holding Eren’s hands in his as the boy sobbed, his frame shaking and shuddering as he cried. Levi wasn’t really sure what he should do then.

Eren made the choice for him, falling heavily into Levi’s bare chest, sobbing into it and leaving tears streaked across his skin. Levi stilled for a moment before retrieving one of his hands from Eren’s, and wrapping his arm around Eren’s back, stroking it in gentle circles like his mother had done to him when he’d had nightmares as a child. Eren had tensed when Levi withdrew his hand, but relaxed again when he felt it on his back. He shuffled closer, as if trying to get nearer to the warmth of Levi’s body, to reassure himself that he was real.

They stayed like that for several minutes. Levi continued to pat Eren, moving his hand up to pet the boy’s hair, sweeping it out of his eyes, the ends dampened by tears. 

“Shhh, kid, it’s gonna be alright,” Levi whispered into Eren’s hair, and he felt the boy shake his head slightly against his chest. 

“No it’s not,” Levi heard Eren mutter quietly.

“What Why do you say that?”

Eren turned his face up to Levi, his cheeks red and tear-streaked, eyes puffy, and Levi was taken aback at the expression on the boy’s face. He looked the way Levi had at the funeral. Grieving and angry and frightened out of his wits.

“I’m no good, Levi, I’m not a good person,” Eren said, burrowing his face into Levi’s shoulder. “I’ve done terrible things, Levi.”

The way Eren’s voice broke as he uttered those words made Levi’s chest feel tight.

“Oh kid,” Levi sighed, stroking Eren’s hair with a light touch, “we all have. Every last one of us.”

Eren looked up at him at that, a perplexed look on his face. Levi stared straight back at him, unwaveringly, and in that moment, Levi felt like they’d come to some sort of understanding, like they’d communicated then, in the dark, with only their eyes, something profound about themselves. 

Levi brought a hand to Eren’s cheek, wiping away salt water with a calloused thumb.

“We all have,” he said again in a whisper.

Eren simply stared at him for a good thirty seconds, lips parted slightly, as if he had something to say that he wasn’t saying. He didn’t speak a word, but reached up to put both arms around Levi’s shoulders, pulling himself up to bring Levi into a tight hug, his chin on Levi’s shoulder, sniffling quietly right next to Levi’s ear. Levi only hesitated a moment before returning the gesture, arms settling around Eren’s waist. 

Eren fell asleep there in Levi’s arms after only a minute or two, his own arms going slack as he drifted off, and Levi had to gently disentangle the two of them before putting Eren back to bed, setting him down softly and tucking the thin blanket up around his shoulders. He dithered there for a moment before getting up to go back to his own room, unsure if he should leave Eren alone, but also unsure about being in Eren’s room in only his underwear when everyone else got up in the morning. He decided it wasn’t a great idea, and since Eren seemed to be calm now and dead to the world, beginning to drool in his sleep, he’d probably be fine if Levi left him alone for the night. 

Back in his own room, Levi collapsed into his own bed, staring up into the dark of the ceiling. That was a different Eren that he’d seen tonight, not the one who had served him drinks in the bar, but someone else. There was some overlap, but the Eren he’d seen just now was very unlike the cheerful blushing kid who invented genuinely terrible new sandwich recipes in his spare time. 

Eren had obviously seen some major shit, and it came for him in the quiet dark of night. Levi could relate.

He wondered what it was that came for Eren in his sleep, what the contents of his nightmares were, and if he’d really want to know.

He wondered what the events of tonight meant for the two of them. 

He wondered which Eren he would see in the morning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See, Eren, you're not the only person who's killed people, it's not such a big deal.  
> He may worry about how Levi would take the news, but let's face it, at this point, Levi is pretty much impossible to shock. And Eren's just too cute for Levi to stay away, killer though he may be.
> 
> Oh yeah, I have an Instagram y'all can go follow if you wanna see what I'm up to; mostly my art and writing updates, yummy food, cool places I go, and selfies, 'cause I gotta indulge my vanity somewhere, amiright?  
> My Instagram is: artemisgraceart


	7. Tell Me True, I'll Accept You

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The fallout of Eren's breakdown brings the revelation of secrets, and the release of feelings only barely held back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry it took me so long to update, you see, my computer decided to self-destruct and take all my files with it, so I lost everything, my art, my writing, my school work. Everything, including my work on Secret to a Long Life.   
> I will be updating much more regularly now that I have this new computer and I am on break from college.   
> Thank you for your patience and your continued support!

The Eren that Levi saw the next morning was not the one from the night-time, but neither was he the cheerful bartender Levi had known before. He seemed to flicker in between the two personalities, unable to fully become the mask he wore, yet not daring to show his true self either. The happy young thing that Eren had appeared was something artificial, Levi now knew, something deliberately constructed by Eren to protect himself, a life that he could slip into, but in which he could never truly remain. 

In truth, the boy was an old soul, prematurely aged by pain and distress. 

A penny in the air.

Levi couldn’t help but feel a bit of a pang in his chest at the thought that he may have been the cause of this distress, of Eren’s sudden inability to be his own invention. Levi hadn’t been meant to be there that night, he hadn’t been meant to see what he had seen. Eren did his best to live, to genuinely become his pretense, but in his sleep he was defenseless against the demons that crept through his dreams. 

Levi had seen Eren vulnerable, likely more vulnerable than anyone had seen him before. He could understand how this might make Eren’s façade falter, and he felt rather perturbed at the thought that he himself had broken Eren’s concentration. He had meant well … he hadn’t thought that his attempt to help would only hurt.

When Levi made his way down the stairs the next morning, Eren was already standing behind the bar, holding a cloth in his hand, yet not wiping anything down, merely staring at the object as if he had forgotten its purpose. Eren twitched at the sound of Levi’s boots descending the stairs, but he didn’t look up. Even as Levi took his place on a stool by the bar, Eren didn’t look at him.

It was like that all day. As Eren tended bar, even as he served Levi meals and drinks, he did not meet Levi’s eyes. The glow that had made his eyes to very striking to Levi seemed dulled somehow, clouded with dark emotion. Levi felt a tightness in his chest every time he watched Eren avoid his eyes; he hated this. 

Levi wanted to see Eren smile, to see him laugh, to see his eyes light up. And he wanted to be the reason Eren smiled and laughed, the one Eren looked at as his eyes lit up. He couldn’t bear to be the thing dampening Eren’s laugh. He wanted to be the one Eren laughed with the most. Levi had to admit this much to himself; he simply couldn’t avoid the knowledge, and he cursed his own self-awareness. He had managed to go so long without giving a single fuck, and this, this caring, was overwhelming to the point of pain. 

The boy was beautiful, even in his sorrow, even as he refused to meet Levi’s gaze, refused to speak a word to him. So very beautiful. 

Perhaps even more beautiful now than he had been before, when he had been all happiness and light. There was a depth to him, and it entranced Levi all the more. Levi itched to know more, itched to be the guardian of Eren’s secrets, to be the one to comfort and calm him. 

The depths of Eren’s emotion were waters that Levi wished to explore. He wanted to bring light to those deep, dark places, or, if there was no light to be brought, he wished to remain in the darkness as the boy’s companion. 

This was ridiculous, how much Levi felt for this kid. He had barely known him at all, only a couple of weeks now, and yet he had this sinking feeling in his gut at Eren’s distress, and a selfish wish to take the suffering away. How could he be in so deep so fast? Such intense sympathy was unlike him. These feelings were ridiculous to him, having struck far harder and far more quickly than he could have believed possible; he barely knew the boy. 

It had been a few weeks in between their meeting and the night Eren woke up screaming, a few weeks of casual conversation in the bar or in the hallway, but they hadn’t gotten exactly close. Fond, yes, but not intimate in their acquaintance, to Levi’s quiet disappointment.

And yet, if he really thought about it, with what he’d seen last night, he probably knew Eren far better now than anyone else this side of the Mississippi river. So his affections may have been more natural than they seemed at first. 

Levi hung around the bar area all day, watching Eren stand in a daze behind the bar counter, witnessing the bustle of people coming and going through the door, a veritable parade to see. He dared not leave, for he had a sneaking suspicion, perhaps paranoia but perhaps not, that if he were to leave, he would not find Eren again when he returned.

So he remained at his place at the bar, so very close, and yet so very far from the lovely, terrified, Eren Jaeger. He remained until closing, until Eren began to clean up, moving in a fashion that was mechanical, unthinking and unconscious as he swept up the debris of the day and wiped down the newest sticky spills on the bar counter. They were alone now, and Levi could address Eren without them being overheard, but what could he say?

“Are you alright?” Levi asked, rather woodenly. He knew that it was a stupid thing to say, as Eren’s lack of ‘alrightness’ was more than evident; still, it was somewhere to start.

The suddenness of Levi’s words breaking the stagnant stillness of the air around him, Eren appeared to come to life, at least a little. He paused in his automatic movements, the spell that had been cast over him all day seemingly broken. 

When his eyes met Levi’s however, the light in them was still out. Levi got the impression that, while Eren might have been looking at him, he was seeing something else entirely, possibly the “terrible thing” that Eren had alluded to the previous night. Levi knew what it was to see another sight overlaying all that he looked upon, but he’d had years more practice than Eren at dealing with his fears.

Levi reached out gingerly, slowly moving to place his own hand atop of Eren’s where it had paused in wiping down the counter between them. To his infinite surprise, Eren let go of the rag he had been holding to grip Levi’s hand, holding it tightly, as if it were a life line, a desperation in his touch. 

He still hadn’t spoken, though Levi could see his mouth working around words, as if he were trying to speak but language eluded him. That was alright, Levi could wait.

“Let’s get you up to bed, okay, Eren?” Levi suggested gently, making no attempt to withdraw his hands from Eren’s, “You’ve cleaned up enough down here, we can blow the lanterns out and go upstairs.”

Eren nodded, still looking a bit lost, though he seemed to be coming back into himself, slowly. The dullness in his eyes was a bit less pronounced, some semblance of life returning to them. Perhaps it was the prospect of sleep in a relatively comfortable bed that stirred Eren from his trance-like state. Perhaps, Levi would like to think, it was the physical contact of Levi’s hand in his that brought him out of the darkness in his head.

But there is something about night-time, isn’t there? We are at once more vulnerable and more bold than we are in the daylight; we are more purely ourselves in the wee hours of night. Perhaps this phenomenon, this odd feeling that the night brings, had something to do with Eren’s coming to life as the lamps were blown out, Levi mused. In the shadows, he had less to hide. 

Eren didn’t let go of Levi’s hand, merely shifting it in his grip so that he could move out from behind the counter and put out the lights. He dawdled at the bottom of the stairs, as if unsure of how to climb them, until Levi gently pulled on the hand in Eren’s grip, leading him slowly up the stairs to the second floor and into the hallway in which they both resided. 

Coming to the door of Eren’s room, Levi turned the knob to find it unlocked, and pushed the door open, rough wood grain scraping his palm. Apparently Eren frequently went without locking his door, possibly because he knew that he had nothing anyone around here would want to steal, Levi supposed from what he’d seen of Eren’s room before. Still, if it were up to Levi, he’d lock the door anyway. Perhaps he was just an untrusting sort of person.

Pulling Eren gently into the room, Levi turned to close the door behind them, shutting it quietly, so as not to disturb the people in the other rooms on this floor. He had been yelled at once before by a lady of the night for shutting a door too loudly, claiming that it had interrupted business, and he wasn’t keen on experiencing such a thing again. The lady had been fierce, and the gentleman with whom she had been conducting business looked awfully sheepish peeking out around the door frame of the lady’s room. It had been thoroughly embarrassing for everyone involved. 

As the door clicked shut, Eren’s grip on Levi’s hand slackened, whatever urgency that had driven him to grip so hard having apparently dissipated, but he still didn’t entirely let go. There was a hesitance to the grip on his hand though, Levi noticed, as if, with the initial desperation having faded, he was no longer sure if the contact was welcome. Of course it was; Levi gently squeezed Eren’s hand attempting to convey this sentiment of his. 

Eren slumped down onto his bed and Levi sat down next to him, a little stiffly, to be honest, as he didn’t know what to expect from the situation in which he currently found himself. The night before, Eren had sobbed into Levi’s chest until he fell asleep from sheer emotional and physical exhaustion, but tonight Eren seemed much calmer. Horribly calm. Like the calm before a terrible storm. 

Eren, with his face turned down, away from Levi, and with his hand still holding Levi’s, let out a heaving sigh before he spoke, his words quite unexpected by Levi.

“I killed somebody, Levi.”

The phrase was most shocking, not because Levi would have thought Eren incapable of such a thing, particularly after last night’s breakdown, but because it is not the sort of thing a person is likely to readily admit. Especially not to a virtual stranger. Though, perhaps Eren no longer thought of Levi as a stranger, but as a genuine friend. The thought stirred a bit of warmth in the depths of Levi’s chest, though he was aware that such a thing was rather inappropriate, considering the context of Eren’s admission.

Levi remained silent, not knowing what to say, and strongly suspecting that Eren wasn’t waiting for Levi to speak, merely to gather himself to speak more. Levi would wait. But he didn’t have to wait long. 

“I killed somebody,” Eren began again, his voice rougher in a way that foreshadowed tears, “I can’t fucking stand it, Levi, I can’t be someone I’m not, even though that’s exactly what brought me to this in the first place! I can’t keep this up, this pretending …”

Eren’s voice trailed off there, before rising once again into a shout, a sort of anger rising in his voice and his grip on Levi’s hand tightening with the rise of emotion in his words.

“I can’t fucking keep this up, Levi, something’s gotta give, but I can’t let it! I can’t let any of it go, so it’s gonna just fucking suffocate me until I die.”

Levi’s eyes widened at that. He couldn’t keep just quiet and let Eren keep going, the boy was in a self-destructive mood, and no one that pretty and kind deserves to be that scared, sad, and angry.

“You killed someone?” Levi asked, keeping his tone even.

“Yeah …” came Eren’s reply, little more than a whisper, as if his outburst had tired him out. Or perhaps it wasn’t the outburst that left him tired, but the path his life had led, battering him like a twig in a roaring river. And he could feel himself at the waterfall’s edge.

“So have I” Levi stated, and the lack of emotion in his confession caused Eren to look up from his lap, tear-brightened eyes glistening as they stared incredulously at Levi.

“What?”

“I’ve killed someone before,” Levi smiled wryly, “surely you didn’t think you were the only one to ever do so?”

“No,” Eren replied, still processing the information that Levi had done more than steal, “but Levi … I killed more than just one somebody.”

“Same with me,” came Levi’s matter-of-fact reply.

“But … but … but I’m a murderer!” Eren shouted, turning away, his speech stilted from the tears beginning to fall and the sobs beginning to wrack his chest. He was working himself up again, getting himself upset. Levi had to put a stop to it.

He turned his body toward Eren, snatching his hand from Eren’s grasp only to place it, along with its pair, on the sides of Eren’s face firmly but gently, holding Eren’s gaze to his own.

“Tell me something, Eren,” Levi said lowly, in a tone most serious, “did they deserve it?”

“What?” 

“Exactly as I said. Did they deserve it? Think hard now, think hard and tell me true, is the world a better place without those people in it?”

“Well, I don’t know …” Eren dithered, his voice tense with anxiety.

“No,” Levi said sharply, his voice a razor blade, “You know. You know the answer. Forget what you are told you should believe, forget propriety, for God’s sake, and tell me true. Did. They. Deserve. It?”

Eren’s wandering gaze came to rest upon Levi’s face, eyes locking with Levi’s own, and he answered.

“Yes.”

Levi smiled gently, but there was a sort of predatory glint to his eye, unsettling. Yet Eren was not afraid. Someone, he thought, probably ought to be afraid of that look, but that someone wasn’t Eren. Levi stroked his fingers softly across the apples of Eren’s cheeks, wiping away tears soothingly; Eren couldn’t help but lean into the touch.

“Good,” Levi said.

That would ring in Eren’s head later, the way that Levi had said to him, upon his confession of murder, that word: good. 

“Feel no guilt then, my dear,” Levi whispered sweetly, his breath ghosting across Eren’s face, a hand moving to card through the young man’s brown hair, “Feel no remorse. Good and bad are mostly relative, and what is wrong can sometimes be right.”

Eren felt like Levi wasn’t just talking about murder there, but about something else. 

Something else …

Levi moved closer, without even being truly conscious of it, as he continued to whisper, “They are not worth your tears; they are not worth your guilt; they haven’t the right to disturb your sleep.”

“But Levi, I’m afraid … of myself, of the consequences that are coming to me …” Eren stumbled over the words, a measure of panic still audible in his voice.

“You can conquer fear, Eren,” Levi said, his fingers still stroking the softness of Eren’s face, “And even if the world won’t …” 

Levi hesitated there, momentarily debating whether or not he should say the thing he had first thought to say, the thing that had first come to mind. It was a rather permanent thing, something of a promise, something which Levi generally didn’t make. But it was the spirit of the thing that mattered, and he could think of nothing else to say. He took a deep breath.

“Even if the world won’t,” Levi whispered, holding Eren’s eyes with his own, “I will accept you.”

Eyes closed. Lips met softly.

And the penny dropped.


	8. Something To Hold On To

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eren and Levi have shared their first kiss, but the world does not turn in their favor, and they are both well aware of it. Where do they go from here?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for: reckless behavior, suicidal thoughts (briefly mentioned), and period-typical homophobia in this chapter, y'all. Please keep this in mind and be aware that you may find it upsetting. I don't want anyone to be hurt because I did not warn them.
> 
> This chapter is a bit shorter than the others, but this is mostly because I'm gearing up for a major shitstorm of a chapter in the near future. So look forward to that, everyone. I will endeavor to update frequently, as I know for myself the frustration of waiting for a new chapter. Things will slow down once school starts up again, but in the meantime, I plan to give you a lot of material to tide you over.
> 
> Thank you so much, everyone, for your support and kind words, they mean a lot to me :) 
> 
> If you want to keep up with me outside AO3, I have an Instagram: artemisgraceart, and a twitter: @artemisgraceart. Yes, I'm ever so creative.

Eren had been the one to move first, eyes fluttering closed as his hands drifted up, up Levi’s forearms, up across Levi’s chest and neck, until they mirrored Levi’s own hands as they cradled his face. Levi’s face was clean-shaven, surprisingly soft for a face with such sharp features, for a man with such a sharp image. Eren swept his thumbs over Levi’s cheekbones as he moved to press his lips against those of the other man.

He could taste that salt of his own tears on Levi’s lips, and there was something so oddly intimate about that. He hadn’t cried in front of anyone since he’d left home, except for this beautiful, strange, captivating man. A highwayman, no less! Not the most trustworthy of professions, generally speaking. But Eren was kissing him anyway.

Perhaps he was signing his own death warrant with this kiss; he couldn’t know until it ended whether it would be accepted or not, and if Levi didn’t accept this, Eren could very well find himself dead or imprisoned. Such was the risk of being himself.

But what had he to fear, really? He was already destined for the gallows, or a bullet, destined for a shallow and forgotten grave; it was only a matter of time, and he might as well have his first kiss before he went. For it was his first, at least, the first that he had initiated, the first that he had actually wanted to give; no others really counted in Eren’s mind. 

As suicides went, this wasn’t the worst way to go.

He waited with baited breath, waiting for Levi to shove him away, to call him something foul, to hurt him, to report him, to shame him, to kill him, but … he didn’t. Levi was still for a moment, during which doubts flooded through Eren’s mind, but then, Levi responded, pressing his lips firmly against Eren’s own. Levi accepted the kiss, he accepted Eren. Sure, Levi had said that he would, but people say a lot of things, and many of them are not sincerely meant. 

His mother and father had told him they’d always love him, always accept him … and they hadn’t been sincere. Time had told their truth, and it hadn’t been sincerity.

But Levi was. Levi was truly sincere.

He didn’t pull away, even as Eren began to cry again. Levi separated their lips, but he didn’t remove his hands from Eren’s cheeks, keeping his forehead pressed to Eren’s own. He gave Eren room to breathe as tiny sobs wracked his frame, but he didn’t push him away, didn’t retreat from him in the slightest. 

Levi didn’t hesitate. He didn’t do anything but cradle Eren in his arms. 

Eren felt a relief so intense that it hurt. Levi accepted him. Accepted him as a murderer, and accepted him as a man who would kiss another man. 

It was sad, Eren thought, that even after Levi accepted Eren as a killer, Eren had still feared that Levi would reject him for the other thing. As if kissing someone could be worse than killing them … but, Eren supposed, a lot of people did indeed feel that way. He knew that there were people in this town who would prefer a murderer over a man who loves another man; the new preacher in town for certain, and the bulk of his flock. The tide of sentiment in his adopted hometown was not rising in his favor.

Eren would have thought that “thou shalt not kill” would be higher up on God’s list than the other thing, but perhaps not. Both would get him hanged, anyway. In this they were equal.  
But Levi didn’t care about either. Jesus fucking Christ, could the man be any more perfect?

Eren never expected feel loved again after he fled his home, but here he was, feeling … this. Emotion welled up in him such that he thought he might choke on it; if it were possible to drown in relief, he would be doing just that. And he wouldn’t have minded at all.

They stayed like that for a while in the darkness of Eren’s room, not speaking, not moving, simply holding each other in silence. But the silence wasn’t tense, it was peaceful, a silence that comforted like a warm blanket, rather than smothered like a noose. 

Eren was still shaking, the flood of adrenaline having left him exhausted, and he went practically boneless in Levi’s arms, flopping into Levi’s chest. The man smelled of some kind of fancy cologne, rich and masculine and probably outrageously expensive, and the silk of his waistcoat was soft and smooth on Eren’s cheek. He could feel more than hear the rumble of Levi’s chuckle.

“Whatever am I to do with you?” Levi whispered fondly into the fluff of Eren’s messy hair, smoothing his hand up and down Eren’s back.

“What will you do?” Eren asked, darkly serious.

Levi caught the tone of Eren’s voice. This was no small question, it was of vital importance.

Levi responded in kind, all fond joking gone from his voice, “What would you like me to do?”

“You’re not gonna kill me, are you? Not gonna turn me in?”

“Of course not, don’t be ridiculous. Besides,” Levi mused, “you’ve done nothing that I myself am not also guilty of. I kissed you just as much as you kissed me. I’ve killed a man just as dead as you have.”

Eren sighed heavily into Levi’s chest, “How’ve you lasted this long, Levi? Being someone like us? How do you stand it?”

“Oh darling boy,” Levi kissed the top of Eren’s head, “you learn to live with it.”

It wasn’t a satisfying answer, but, if Eren really considered it, he could think of nothing else Levi could have truthfully said. Levi had learned to live with it, and he evidently believed Eren capable of the same.  
“But,” Levi added, drawing Eren’s attention once again, a curiously dark undercurrent running beneath his words, “you can gain satisfaction from the ruination of those who would ruin you.”

A sort of lupine smile crept onto the older man’s face, a predatory smile with too much teeth, as he continued to speak, “If they would have you be poor, you take their money. If they would have you be humiliated, you take their dignity. If they would have you be dead, my dear, you take their lives. And justice, in a way, is served.”

“Levi …” Eren exhaled the man’s name with a small measure of shock, turning his face up to look into those steel grey eyes looking down into his.

“No truly benevolent God would fault you for it,” Levi interrupted, taking Eren’s face in his hands, speaking with an intensity Eren hadn’t seen before, “Any God that would disown you is not benevolent, and certainly is not worth your worship or your fear. Worship at your own alter, my dear, worship yourself, for you are a far purer soul than a God that would kill innocents in an infantile rage.” 

“You haven’t seen me though, Levi …” Eren averted his eyes, “you haven’t seen me in my own rage. I’m a monster Levi.”

“You could never be a monster, not like that. You never sent a flood to kill the world,” Levi laughed, “I think it’s safe to say that no matter what you may do in this life, you can still stay above that. It’s pretty damn hard to be worse than that.”

“Wow … you’ve really got some issues with God, don’t you?” Eren joked, his mood lightening with Levi’s laugh.

“Absolutely. The Lord and I are not on speaking terms, and we haven’t been for a long time.” Levi grinned down at Eren, teeth flashing white in the darkness of the room. 

“I assume there’s a story behind that?”

“Yes, but it’s one for another time,” Levi’s eyes darkened momentarily and Eren thought he’d best let the subject drop for now. Levi would share his story with Eren when he felt the desire to, and not a moment before. He seemed that type of man. Besides, they’d both had enough ups and downs for one night.

“You never answered my question, though,” Levi said, voice and eyes both lightening, but some measure of seriousness still remaining.

“What?” Eren asked, confused.

“What would you like me to do? With you?”

Eren couldn’t say for sure. What did he want? He’d been too busy thinking about a violent end to consider any sort of beginning. And yet, here Levi was, asking him where to begin. What did Eren want from Levi?

“Just …” Eren trailed off, still unsure.

“Yes?”

Eren’s fingers curled and uncurled in the fabric of Levi’s shirt, a sort of nervous twitch. 

“Just stick around, ok? I don’t know where I’m goin’ from here, but I hope you’ll be there along with me.”

Levi smiled softly, fingers smoothing Eren’s nut-brown hair back from his face, “Sounds good.”

“Um … are we gonna kiss again?” Eren asked, a flush rising in his cheeks, his eyes glittering golden in the faint moonlight that filtered through the thin curtains of his bedroom window.

“I can’t pretend that I don’t like the sound of that,” Levi grinned, “but you know how dangerous this is, don’t you?”

Eren sat up straighter, looking Levi directly in the eye, the look in his own eyes sharp as knives.

“I know better than anyone, Levi. How do you think I ended up all the way out here, in the middle of fucking nowhere?”

“Okay, okay,” Levi stroked a thumb over the back of Eren’s hand, which had, without him even realizing, curled into a fist, “I don’t mean to cause upset, I just wanna make sure you’re aware of the risk. It's no small thing.”

“I’m aware of the risk, and I’m willing to take it,” Eren assured the other man, his brows furrowing with the intensity of his conviction.

“Oh, how could I say no to such a determined face?” Levi chuckled, leaning in to place another kiss on Eren’s lips, a hand slipping up over the boy’s chest to rest on the back of Eren’s neck, gently tilting his head to get a better angle as he deepened the kiss.

It was even better than Eren had imagined. This closeness, it was intoxicating, and he could easily see himself addicted.

When Levi moved to pull back, Eren chased his lips unconsciously, blushing when he realized what he was doing. Levi gave him a teasing grin, but instead of being embarrassing, Eren found it kinda … well … hot. And then Levi had to ruin the moment by reintroducing reality to Eren’s fuzzy, affection-drunk mind.

“We’ll have to be discreet, you know. I don’t fancy us getting lynched. We won’t be able to do whatever we want whenever. After closing, like this, is pretty much gonna be the only time we can meet.”

“Yeah, I know,” Eren replied, admittedly a bit petulantly, though he understood full well the importance of what Levi was saying. He understood, but he didn’t like it. 

Eren knew that he’d dance some hangman’s jig while wearing a hempen necktie someday, it seemed inevitable, but if Levi was to be here … Eren would prefer to put that day off. He’d rather his expiration date were sometime far off, like plum preserves or something. 

He also knew that if Levi weren’t there … Eren might dance that jig of his own volition. He’d been ready to earlier tonight. Well, not exactly ready, but he hadn’t cared one way or the other whether he’d live or die. What a difference a few minutes and a kiss makes. He craved more kisses and a longer life in which to enjoy them.

And what is life but a series of cravings that one is compelled to satisfy? Our wants are as much of a compelling reason to keep going as our needs. Humanity wants, endlessly, insatiably, and Eren was no exemption to the rule.

It wasn’t healthy, he knew, to have this man be his reason for living, but any port in a storm, right? He’d cling to whatever life raft presented itself. He’d clung to Mikasa and Armin when he was younger, but they lived only in Eren’s past now, for their good as well as Eren’s own, and he’d have to cling to some other raft. He’d found one now in the guise of a highwayman dressed in silk and satin. He felt, for some reason he couldn’t entirely explain, that Levi could help keep Eren’s nightmares from becoming unbearable, if he stayed by Eren’s side.

Eren never claimed to be in a healthy frame of mind. After all, he’d blacked out and killed several men only a year or so before. That couldn’t exactly be called healthy. But, if anyone could understand him, he thought that Levi could. There was just something about the man, a ruthlessness running through his veins, an energy humming just beneath the skin, that called to something in Eren’s own self. 

Maybe it was stupid, but he’d place his trust in this man. Well, really, so what if it was stupid? He’d been stupid enough for a dozen people already so far; why break the habit of a lifetime?

And it wasn’t one-sided. Eren was just as capable of destroying Levi at this point as Levi was of destroying Eren. Levi was trusting Eren with his life just as much as Eren was trusting Levi with his.

Eren had often felt as though he were being swept along in a rushing current, the momentum buffeting him against rocks and logs beneath the surface, battering him. It was as though his life were spinning ever more out of his control, as though fate were some kind of random clusterfuck of events to which Eren would be subject. But for once, he felt as though the random, rough ride through life had washed him up next to something good, something genuinely good, for him to find solace in. Fate had thrown him a bone for once, and he was gonna take it.

He'd take Levi, if Levi would have him.

As Levi kissed him again, and again, hands combing gentle fingers through Eren’s hair, and as he felt the quick beating of Levi’s heart through the fabric of his shirt, Eren knew that Levi would.


	9. Goodnight, Love

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Levi thinks to himself about his newfound relationship with Eren, doing a very poor job of reigning in his giddy excitement, although he must also consider the possible consequences and how he can keep Eren, and himself, safe. 
> 
> This is a short chapter, as it's really more of one very long chapter divided into two, the second half of which should be along soon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm updating in a reasonable time period, hoorah! What a remarkable, unlikely feat, huh?

They stayed there, in the quiet dark, illuminated by only a sliver of moonlight filtering through the curtains, for about a half hour or so, by which time Eren’s heavy breathing had slowed, and tears no longer ran in rivulets down his cheeks, kissed away by Levi’s soft lips. Levi’s kisses calmed him so, each brush of lips against lips beating back the clouds of despair that had threatened to overcome Eren’s mind, restoring peace to him, restoring to him a sense that, all these many trials aside, he would emerge from the rubble of his past alive. 

Even as Eren began to lull into sleep, eyelids growing heavy and fluttering with the great effort of keeping them from closing completely, he could feel Levi peppering the side of his face in chaste little kisses, and his hand combing gently through Eren’s hair, so soothingly, his hands playing a lullaby, making Eren feel so safe, safe in a way he hadn’t felt for such a long time. Tension that he hadn’t even realized was there, for it had been there as far back as his memory served him, melted away from his body, and muscles that he hadn’t realized were tensed relaxed as he draped himself over Levi, reveling in the other man’s warmth … he’d forgotten just how nice the warm embrace of another person could be. It could make him feel almost human again.

In his twilight state of half-asleep, Eren felt himself being gently lowered onto his tattered mattress by Levi’s careful hands, flopping bonelessly and uncooperatively onto the soft surface as Levi tried, largely in vain, to take his shoes off and tuck him in amongst the nest of blankets that passed, to Eren, as a well-made bed. He could hear Levi chuckling and saying something in a tone of amusement, but Eren was too far gone into the realm of dreams to understand it. He only remained awake long enough to feel a last gentle kiss pressed to his temple, before he slipped off into a deep sleep.

Only a few moments after he’d been tucked in, Eren began to snore, and God help him, Levi found it cute. This boy was gonna wreck him, he could feel it even now, as Eren rolled over to squish his face deep into his pillow, making little snuffling sounds as he curled into a ball, and tangled the sheets around himself in such a way that Levi suspected he might need help in the morning to escape them. 

He stood up from Eren’s bedside, stepping as quietly as he could across the weathered, creaking floorboards, gently opening Eren’s door to step through out into the hallway, and closing it behind himself as silently as is possible with such loudly squealing hinges. Honestly, what could Eren possibly have done to them? They sounded awful, more so than any hinges had the right to sound. If Eren didn’t grease them soon, Levi would, as he simply would not stand for living next door to such a hideous sound; however much he might like Eren, the squealing door hinges had to go. 

Especially if they were to spend some of their nights together, as the events of this evening had implied. 

Loud hinges would not aid them in this endeavor, not if they wished not to get caught. They had to remember that, however busy they might be on any given night, the ladies who did business on this floor of the building still might overhear something or see something that could get Eren and Levi in deep, deep shit, to put it nicely. To put it frankly, it could get them run out of town at the very least.

Levi wasn’t entirely sure what the penalty for two men being together was in this state, but he could pretty well guess that it was a prison sentence, though how long of one he couldn’t say. And this town itself might have its own laws surrounding the subject, laws that could be even stricter, as the state government’s hand rarely reached this far into the back of beyond. And let’s face it, the angry mob is much quicker to the punch than a proper court of law; if the townspeople came for them, it would likely be with pitchforks, not a warrant of arrest. 

He would like not to think of these things; he’d rather bask in the glow of whatever it was blossoming between Eren and himself, rather feel the giddiness that sweet kisses from a bright-eyed boy should bring, but these sentiments were dampened by the cold, harsh fog of reality settling upon his mind. Eren had said that he knew well the consequences, and Levi had no cause to disbelieve him, but the boy was young, several years younger than Levi himself, and he may not be able to reign in his emotions, to hide in plain sight, as much as would be necessary. Levi would have to look out for the both of them. 

That is not to say that the excitement of this new development didn’t get to him, lord knows it did. Eren could make Levi’s heart hammer in his chest like nothing else, could make his breaths come faster, his hands itch to touch; he could make him almost drunk on emotion, giddy with the high of kisses, almost entirely overwhelmed. Eren made butterflies flutter in Levi’s chest, the sensation, the passion, driving him to the point of stupidity … and that was something Levi had to resist. He couldn’t allow himself to be stupidly in love, however wonderful the idea sounded, for stupidity could get himself, and Eren, killed. He had to love wisely, or as wisely as is possible with such a rush of feeling as Eren could evoke in him.

He’d kill to be able to act as he’d like, to kiss Eren in the daylight, unafraid, to keep Eren in bed all day, with no need to do anything but indulge in each other’s presence, no worries, nothing for them to concern themselves with outside of their own little sphere of a universe. He wanted to leave dark love bites all over Eren’s tanned skin, to make him gasp and moan in his nest-like tangle of sheets … but he could do none of these things. He’d try his damndest, get as close to the dream as he could, taking Eren with him, but compromises would have to be made. Even if it were possible to attain these things by killing, there were far too many people in the world for that to be a really plausible strategy. Curses upon reality. 

They would have to love in quiet, hidden and secret, striving to be overlooked. 

He was probably jumping the gun, by calling it love so soon, but the more he thought about it, the more he looked into Eren’s eyes, seeing the desperation and anger therein, so very familiar to him, the more certain he was. First love had come late to Levi, but it had hit him like a runaway coach. He hadn’t stood a chance.

It made his stomach twist uncomfortably, just a little, he could admit in a small, shameful corner of his mind, to consider that his feelings for Eren may not be quite the same as Eren’s feelings for him, that Eren’s feelings may be much more casual, more fleeting, but if there’s anything that the life Levi’s led has taught him, it is to enjoy a good thing while it lasts. Endings would come when and how they liked, with complete disregard of Levi’s preferences, and all that could be done was to take full advantage of the good things before the expiration date arrived. To question too much, to worry, would simply be to waste his limited time.

So he pushed that anxiety down, intent instead on giving Eren, and by extension himself, the time of his life, to the best of his ability. Levi could happily spend his limited time on this sweet, vicious, gorgeous boy, and meet whatever end that eventually came entirely without regret. 

He would love, regardless. 

Levi tiptoed his way silently the few steps in between Eren’s door and his own, being sure that no one, should anyone even be awake at this hour, could hear his movements, slipping into his room without a sound and shutting the door behind himself with only a barely audible clicking of the latch. In the privacy of the shadows of his room, Levi raised a hand to his lips, which still tingled slightly with the sensation of Eren’s lips, tongue, and teeth. The boy was a quick learner, and Levi could tell he was absolutely doomed. 

He shook his head quickly so as to dislodge any further thoughts of Eren’s mouth, willing himself not to imagine anything further, for yonder lay madness. And sleeplessness. It was terribly late, and Levi had another coach to rob tomorrow, so he’d best be well-rested. While he’s out, he’ll see if he can find something nice to give Eren. 

A pocket watch, perhaps; Levi had seen how Eren had admired his watch when he slipped the shining mechanism from his pocket to check the time, and perhaps Eren might like one of his own. And Levi would simply love to dote on the boy; what better thing was there to do with all this cash? He smiled to himself, more pleased than he would readily admit by imagining how Eren might respond to such a gift, how his golden eyes would light up, how a sweet smile would spread across his lovely features, how he would throw his arms about Levi, how he’d kiss him … and yes, Levi is absolutely distracted by the thought of Eren’s lips, however much he might try not to be. With the taste of Eren’s kiss still upon his tongue, he could concentrate on nothing else.

He disrobed with what he intended to be haste, but with what turned out to be slow, Levi’s actions delayed as his mind was still preoccupied with all things Eren. He laid out the jacket and vest he intended to wear tomorrow on the chair of his small bedside table, the jacket a rich dark black, and the vest a silken dove grey, a color that he well knew brought out the intensity of his eyes. Even he couldn’t pretend that he wasn’t dressing up a bit for Eren’s benefit. He didn’t truthfully need to, of course, Eren already liked him so there was, in theory, no true need for more attempts to impress, but he still felt compelled to make attempts. With a small flutter of excitement in his chest, Levi wondered if Eren might do the same for him.

Levi laid himself down in his bed to sleep, a hand pressed to his chest even as he lay back, as if to contain the sound of the muscle’s rapid beating, lest it resonate outside of his body, echoing out into the dark, dusty night. Sleep did not come easy to him, his mind far too busy to rest quietly, but when it did come, his dreams were, as is no surprise, filled with images of a certain young, beautiful bartender.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Levi's concern over his and Eren's safety is completely justified.   
> Though Eren may say that he fully understands the risks, and it is true that he has seen the darkness of people up close and personal, he has not seen as much of the world as Levi has, and his tendency towards impulsive actions may leave him at a distinct disadvantage.   
> All God's children have the potential to be terrible, even those who claim to speak for him.


	10. Passing Notes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eren wakes the morning after his and Levi's romantic confessions, feeling ever so giddy over the positive turn in his as-yet unpleasant life. Levi leaves a note for him, promising him a gift upon his return to the saloon that night, about which Eren is ecstatic.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry, everyone, for the long silence. I've been wrapped up in work for university, and I've been poorly with a case of pneumonia, which SUCKED.   
> In other news, the quarter is almost over, and I shall have another break in which to draw and write.   
> For those who wanna keep up with my other news, I refer you to my Twitter, @artemisgraceart.

As daylight broke and the early morning sun cast its light across the west, beams of light made their way through the thin cotton curtains of Eren’s rented room to shine upon his face, warming his skin and waking him gently from the deepest sleep he’s had since, well, he can’t remember when. His eyelids fluttered with the effort of raising his lids, his eyes resisting wakefulness, eyelashes tickling the apples of his cheeks, the skin marked with the impression of the folds of his sheets. Slumber did not intend on leaving him without a fight. He stretched out his long limbs with a satisfied groan, joints cracking from their long hours of stillness. 

A feeling of optimism filled Eren, a warm sensation in his chest and a looseness in his shoulders; he hadn’t realized how tense he’d been up until now. He supposed it was like how you never notice the whistling of the wind until it suddenly stops, the silence far louder than the continuous, familiar noise. Relaxation was such a foreign sensation, one that he found to be a balm, seeping into him and healing the bruises of life’s battering all the way down to his bones, this relief a welcome stranger to Eren’s fatigued spirit. 

For once, it felt as though his world was not about to suffer an immediate and devastating cataclysm. 

The sun rose and the wind blew, carrying along its cargo of dust and the scent of sagebrush, as it would continue to do for centuries to come, regardless of whatever events took place in the realm of men. The universe cared not what Eren had done, nor what he might one day do; his moral character wasn’t the world’s to judge. Eren was his own and only judge, apart, perhaps, from Levi. And Levi loved him despite his failings, severe though they may be. 

Eren couldn’t, for true, understand what went through the heads of other people such that they needed to believe in a god so desperately, that they needed to believe that the universe was aware of them. No, not only aware, but deeply invested in the lives of each and every individual in this wide, wide world. 

They seemed to find comfort in the thought of this omnipresent watcher, but Eren found comfort in an idea that was quite the opposite. He found more solace in the notion that there was no higher power monitoring him from above, that God, if He existed, for Eren couldn’t be sure either way, couldn’t give two shits about the lives of men. It meant that there was no force actively trying to ruin his life. The notion of cruel coincidence, cruel though it may be, was a step up from that of a deity who would push Eren into danger and derive joy from Eren’s own suffering. 

Why else would God “test” the faithful, if not because he was a sadistic prick? Christ, Eren could hear Levi in his own voice; the man was clearly rubbing off on him … 

Ahem … Eren’s mind strayed elsewhere at that particular phrase, and he blushed and rolled over to hide his heated cheeks in the privacy of his pillow. That wasn’t a thought for this early in the morning, especially considering he couldn’t be alone with Levi, in a situation where he might explore this … idea … further, until well after dark.

Or perhaps Levi’s influence wasn’t, in fact, the force that had changed Eren’s beliefs, but perhaps it had merely given Eren a nudge, a little push that made him more aware of his own doubts and criticisms, for indeed, the more Eren thought about it, the less sense it made to him. 

Then why couldn’t everyone else see it? Eren would never claim to be a genius, but to him, his logic appeared sound. Perhaps it was because Eren didn’t need an eternal Watcher to guide him, the way so many others did. Perhaps because some folks just aren’t content to wander blind through their existence the way Eren does, but prefer to see a more profound “meaning.” And, because of that, Eren considers, even if this meaning turned out to be a mere mirage in the grand desert that was the sands of time, it was still important. It gave itself its own meaning. 

Oh well, so long as it helps them, let them believe. It hadn’t done himself nor Levi much good, but that’s not to say that such a thing is without merit. 

And anyway, truth, it would seem, is relative. His truth was not theirs, and neither was their truth his, and who could say which truth was more true? We are all but ants in an anthill, in the vastness of this cosmos, and much as the ants have no true understanding of the intricacies of the lives of humans, humans have no understanding of that which has come before them and that which will come after.

Eren’s undeniable truth this morning, however, was that he had better get up and get dressed awful quick if he didn’t want to get a thorough, and to be honest, well-deserved, chewing out from his boss. Jolted from his comfortable state of half-dozing by that sudden realization, Eren flung himself upright, an action which he came to regret almost instantly as all the blood rushed away from his head and down to his outstretched legs, rendering him incredibly dizzy. 

He stood woozily, finding walking to be rather more difficult than he’d like as he stumbled his way to his dressing table, and the water bowl and cloth sitting upon it. He wet the cloth and brought it up to wash his face and neck, suddenly aware that he could really use a proper bath. But he hadn’t had time enough last night to shift the metal washtub, he’d been distracted, one could say, nor did he have time this morning to haul and heat up so many buckets of water as he’d need to fill it. He’d have to do it tonight, he supposed, before his rendezvous with Levi. 

His rendezvous with Levi … he had to admit that the thought of it was occupying the vast majority of his mind. He’d had his first proper kiss last night, and while he knew he ought to be overwhelmed enough by that development alone, he couldn’t help but imagine something more. A craving, one could say, born in the moment of self-acceptance that had been the kiss. He’d tasted what this side of human relations had to offer, and what is he but a red-blooded man like any other? His inclinations may not be exactly the norm, but he certainly could understand the desires of the flesh. He wanted to touch and be touched, to prove that he was here, and that he was alright, and that, despite his previous experience, there are good things in this world after all. 

Good things like the cheeky little grin Levi gives him when he does something foolish, like the feel of Levi’s fingertips stroking the length of Eren’s spine as they kiss, like the way Levi looks at him as though he’s a person, a real person. No monster, no aberration, no sinner, no beast, no perversion of nature; just a person. Human. 

The feeling of another person’s skin against his own; it wasn’t something that he’d ever thought he’d get to experience. Affection, particularly physical affection, was just something that happened to other people.   
Love was something that happened to other people. Until now.

Tonight he’d see Levi again, the two of them alone in a little bubble of calm, floating gently through the churning waters of their lives, safe from the sharks that prey in the daylight. The judges who would condemn them cannot see in the dark, and right and wrong come second to the sensation of a warm touch in the soft, warm lamplight of Eren’s bedroom. And Eren can’t hardly wait. 

Once fully dressed, Eren made his way down the hall, the weathered wooden floorboards creaking underfoot as he headed for the stairs, descending with a lightness to his step, most uncharacteristic of himself, if the side-eye he received from Mr. Campbell from where he stood behind the bar. 

“What’s gotten into you?” the man addressed him rather gruffly. Evidently Eren’s boss hadn’t had the same good night’s sleep that Eren himself had. 

“What?” Eren responded cheerily, bouncing down from the last step onto the floor and sliding over to stand beside Mr. Campbell at the bar, eagerly taking up the rag the man offered him and beginning to scrub down the somehow already sticky countertop. 

“You’re far too awake for this time of the morning.”

Eren shrugged, a silly smile on his face, despite himself.

“And too happy,” the man tilted his head, regarding Eren with something not unlike suspicion, “What happened? You finally get yourself a girl?”

It is at this point that Eren choked on his own spit. 

Mr. Campbell smiles smugly as Eren splutters, in an equally smug voice saying, “Thought so. S’about time, really. What are you, seventeen, eighteen?”

“Um …” Eren paused to clear his throat, “nineteen.” 

“Nineteen? Jesus, then it really is about time.”

Eren’s initial good mood was well on its way to thoroughly dissipated, as he did not appreciate Mr. Campbell’s remarks. Eren was well aware that most men his age had much more experience than himself, fully conscious that many men his age were already married, some with children, and all too aware that he himself wasn’t, and, considering recent developments, likely never would. He was not, however, some innocent, naïve child like Mr. Campbell seemed to be suggesting. Hell, his activities of the previous night alone would turn Mr. Campbell white as a sheet with shock, and the man would probably have a heart attack upon hearing what drove Eren west. 

The notion that sexual experience is the measure by which one should judge life experience is simply ridiculous, if widely accepted. But perhaps, Eren considered, some people may lead such uneventful lives that the act of sexual congress truly is their single most defining moment, the pinnacle of achievement. Eren’s own defining moments had been significantly more dramatic, so perhaps his perspective is skewed, or perhaps it merely comes down to a difference in values.

Though Eren knows that the criticism is without a solid foundation, he can’t help the crease in his brow and the burning that rises in his cheeks at the man’s mocking tone. He couldn’t think of a single word with which to form a good retort, so he did his best to ignore the comment, scrubbing viciously at a patch of spilled … something Eren could not and did not want to identify … that had dried onto the counter.   
Well, fuck Mr. Campbell anyway, Eren’s an outlaw, defying societal expectations is practically his purview.

As Mr. Campbell sort of harrumphed and wandered away, presumably to do stock or something, Eren heard the telltale click of very expensive shoes coming down the stairs, and he kept his head down, looking at the counter, in an attempt to hide the flutter in his chest at Levi’s close proximity. The man sat down upon the stool directly opposite him, and Eren looked up into a pair of captivating steel-grey eyes, somehow warm despite the coolness of their color. 

Eren couldn’t help but scan Levi’s face, taking in the slight crinkles of smile lines around his eyes, the curl of his lip in his characteristic sort of smirk, the arch of his spine as he leaned slightly over the counter, only a few inches closer to him, but Eren could feel every inch between them ever so acutely. His skin fairly prickled at Levi being near, the fine hairs on his arms raising as if he’d just been caught in a chilly draught.   
“I’m off to work,” Levi said, his voice low, and while Eren registered the words Levi had said, he had to admit to some amount of distraction as he watched the movements of Levi’s lips. The reverie was broken by a pair of fingers snapping sharply in front of Eren’s face.

“Hey, kid, pull yourself together,” came Levi’s gruff voice, drawing Eren back to reality, a reality in which discretion meant survival. Eren must maintain that discretion, that secrecy, no matter how giddy he felt.   
“Yeah, sorry,” Eren apologized, forcing his eyes away from the distractions that are Levi’s eyes and mouth, only looking back once he felt he could do so without giving his emotions away. 

“Don’t apologize,” Levi chided gently, and Eren can almost hear the whisper of the pet name absent from the sentence. Don’t apologize, love. Don’t apologize sweetheart. The sentiment was there, even if the words could not be spoken. The way he said it too gave Eren the impression that Levi understood Eren’s difficulty seeming dispassionate, that Levi too struggled not to stare. 

Levi the stood from his seat, adjusting his coat, which Eren had noted looked particularly fine this morning, and as he turned away to head towards the door, Eren caught the faintest hint of a wink thrown in his direction, pink blooming in his face once again. Did Levi’s hips usually sway that much when he walked? Was it a deliberate move on Levi’s part, or was Eren simply being … over-attentive? Good Lord … “Pull yourself together,” Levi had told him, but Eren would like to know how, exactly, he’s meant to do that when Levi is over there being criminally attractive. 

It was only then that Eren noticed a small piece of folded paper just peeking out from under his own forearm where it had been resting upon the counter. Levi must have slipped it to him at some point during their short exchange, though Eren couldn’t say when; he hadn’t noticed a thing. Yet another insight into the hidden depths that were Levi’s skill set; the man would make an excellent spy as well as a highwayman. He could well have been one at some point, for all Eren knew; there were parts of Levi’s life about which Eren still knew nothing, despite the evenings they’d spent talking. There would be more evenings for talking though, more nights in which they could share secrets and intimacies, plenty of time for Eren to learn about Levi, and for Levi to learn about Eren.

Being as surreptitious as his own skill set would allow, which was in all honesty not terribly furtive, Eren snuck the slip of paper out from under his arm, pulling his hands back behind the counter to open the note in what privacy the bar could provide. He unfolded the paper, smoothing its slightly crinkled surface out between his fingers. The message was brief, but bore such promise as to set Eren’s heart aflutter all over again.   
‘Come to my room tonight after closing. I’ll have a gift for you. Oh, and destroy this note, will you?’

Eren flushed and looked up, eyes darting to the doorway through which Levi had already taken his leave. He wadded up the note, crumpling it into a tiny ball before shoving it into the pocket of his trousers and returning to minding the bar, color still high in his cheeks. 

He couldn’t wait.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Eren, you thirsty, love-sick fool, you! Not that Levi is much better, really.   
> I would, however, refer you to the graphic violence and homophobia warnings on this fic, for the honeymoon phase can only last so long, and I did start out as a horror writer, after all.   
> This fic may seem a bit anti-religion, but I would like to specify that I am not against religion, merely against the abuse of it in order to deny people their rights. My opinions are not always in line with my characters, as we are entirely different people.   
> There is also going to be some faith-related character development for both Levi and Eren, so plot things will happen, wink wonk.


	11. Attar of Roses

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter ended up running rather long, so I've split it into two parts, of which this is the first.   
> Eren anticipates his evening rendezvous with Levi, fighting off the distraction of old memories, and having an embarrassing moment involving himself and a washtub which is way too small for a person his size to fit in comfortably.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry it's been so long since the last update. Life things happened, as they are wont to do. Lots of illness, doctor visits, moving back home from school, etc.   
> I always want to update at some sort of regular interval, and yet it never manages to happen ...  
> Anyway, this fic is most certainly not abandoned, nor will it be. I intend to see it through to its proper end.

Eren greeted the setting of the sun with anticipation, a nervous energy of the sort to make his hands tremble slightly as he wiped down clean glasses, and to make his head shoot up to stare at the doorway every time he heard the jingling of the front door bell, even while aware that it was far too early yet for Levi to come walking in.

Some cajoling and no minor amount of pleading had convinced Mr. Campbell to allow Eren to close up the bar early that night. Business hadn’t been particularly brisk and, Eren suspected, Mr. Campbell was just as eager as he to close up and retreat to his own room, although for likely very different reasons. 

Eren, for his own part, still had to take a bath before Levi’s arrival. It hadn’t been mandated, of course; while Levi seemed well the sort to complain nigh endlessly about the personal hygiene of others, he didn’t appear to be the type to tell another man how to run his life. He certainly wouldn’t appreciate it if anybody tried that sort of nonsense with him. Still, while Levi might not have insisted upon it, and while there was no guarantee of there being the type of physical contact between them that would necessitate a bath that night, Eren thought he might as well. It’s just the sort of thing one does when trying to impress, and though it may embarrass him to admit it, Eren was awfully keen to impress Levi. 

Besides, Eren was also well aware that he himself did not, at that moment, smell anything like, say, attar of roses. Rather, he likely smelled of an unwashed body with notes of spilt beer and spirits, and even a cursory scrub down would make for a significant improvement. And Levi might appreciate the effort.

Attar of roses … a wave of gentle melancholy washed over Eren, far less acute than the pains he’d experienced before Levi’s introduction into his life, but still felt nonetheless. Truth be told, he would probably always feel a slight ache at the thought of what he’d left behind him, no matter how much of a balm Levi’s presence might be. The ache was and would be incurable, but now that he wasn’t alone in the world, it would be bearable. 

Mikasa had worn attar of roses, just a dash every morning from a bottle purchased for her by Armin, once the first bottle, a gift from her mother now dead, had eventually run out. She probably wore it still, hundreds of miles away from here, drifting about the house in a soft cloud of rose scent. 

He tries not to, but he still misses it. Attar of roses was the smell of home, of the sister whom he held most dear, besides being just lovely in itself … but the best that Eren could do, for now, was a soap with a dash of essence of vanilla, the bar growing ever smaller from use. And he would use it until the bar was too small to hold, nothing but a sliver slipping between Eren’s fingers.

Perhaps he could eventually grow to see the scent of vanilla and Levi’s fancy cologne as the smell of home. His new home. It might yet become a home, rather than just a place in which to lie low.

He had announced last call for alcohol or food about half an hour ago, long enough ago that it wouldn’t be too sudden for him to begin pushing the thoroughly inebriated bar patrons out the door. And push them he did, shepherding them towards the exit like a flock of extremely drunk sheep, darting to the side once or twice to block the path of a particularly wayward customer who attempted to remain in the bar, warning them that he was not above hitting any of them with a broom, should it prove necessary. They, most wisely, took him at his word, and it was but the work of a few minutes to get the saloon cleared of people, apart from Eren himself.

He made especially quick work of the sweeping up, prioritizing having the time to bathe over cleaning an area that would never stay tidy for any appreciable length of time, no matter how thorough Eren’s attempts at cleaning. It wouldn’t be hard to convince Mr. Campbell that Eren had done his job just as fastidiously as usual. After all, how would he be able to identify which sticky spots were from the night before and which were from the morning? They seemed to appear as if from nowhere anyhow, manifesting on every surface without apparent cause, as if summoned there merely by Eren’s entry into the room, carrying his washrag or his mop and bucket. Perhaps the stickiness was simply an occupational hazard when working in, or owning, a bar.

The wretched stickiness would be eternal. 

Eren’s own stickiness, however, mostly dried sweat from that day’s heat and exertions, could be remedied, so he made his way to the back room in which the metal wash bucket hung from its hook on the wall. It was large for a bucket, but it was still only barely large enough for Eren to fit into, and that in itself required a certain amount of folding himself up in a fashion somewhat reminiscent of origami. 

Mikasa and Armin had once gifted him with a book on the subject for Christmas, along with some suitable paper, in an attempt to find him a “hobby.” He hadn’t taken to it, being far too impatient and easily frustrated for such an activity, but he had appreciated the thought behind it. He shook his head to clear the memory, to ward off that old familiar longing. 

His past seemed intent on lingering in the forefront of his mind that day, but he knew he mustn’t let it. 

Eren set the wash bucket down on the floor of the storeroom with a clatter that made him shudder, wary that such a noise might well wake those slumbering upstairs. He’d rather not have a mob of angry, sleepy people stumbling in on him sitting naked in a tiny wash tub. Aside from anything else, he wouldn’t have a chance of being ready before Levi got back. It entirely goes without saying that he’d also look absolutely ridiculous folded up in the confining space and covered in soap suds. The sheer indignity of it could well prove fatal.

There was, of course, a bathhouse-type thing, more of a rickety shed, really, but with a few tubs in it, for the guest to use if the washstands in their rooms did not suffice. It was kept decently clean, usually by Eren himself, but he didn’t like using it. There was no assurance of privacy, and while Eren didn’t have much in the way of insecurity about his body, the scars that littered his skin, the marks of broken glass, were not something he wanted to advertise. They were the evidence that yet remained on his person of that night not too long ago when he’d had to leave his life behind. 

He knew that he was still decent looking despite them, but they did have the tendency to provoke questions, questions that would be extremely difficult to answer. They may even be in his description on his wanted posters; he hadn’t seen any recently so he couldn’t be sure, but the possibility remained. The witness to Eren’s crime … the survivor … might have told the police about the broken glass. 

All in all, he preferred the privacy of the storeroom to the larger space of the bathing shed. 

He went as quickly as he could about retrieving water from the spigot out back, taking it to the kitchen to heat it, and running it back to dump it in the tub, taking care not to take too long and let the water to go cold before he could use it, but also not to make it too boiling hot. It wouldn’t do to show up for a romantic rendezvous sporting a stunning shade of boiled-lobster red. 

The tub filled, and at a satisfactory temperature in the more pleasing range somewhere between glacial and burning, Eren swiftly undressed and climbed in, soap in hand. 

Christ almighty, the hot water felt nice on Eren’s skin, warming throughout the stiff muscles to render them comfortably pliable once again, a form of relaxation that he didn’t often have the time or opportunity to experience. Typically, a quick scrub and rinse from the washstand and pitcher in his room was the best he could hope for. A proper bath, small and awkward though the tub may be, was a luxury. 

It still made him miss the large claw-foot bathtub they’d had back home. But it didn’t do to think about that.

He lost himself in it, in the sheer luxury of a nice long soak, in the joy of smelling nice for a change … and in losing himself, he totally lost track of time as well, that is, until the creak and slam of the front door tore him rather abruptly from his peaceful reverie. He sat upright suddenly, causing water to slosh out of the tub and onto the floor. It must have been a fairly audible slosh, because just then, a voice called out.

“Eren? Is that you?”

Levi was back, and Eren was still sitting naked in a bucket … and since washing his hair had turned into amateur hairstyling with soap, Eren currently had a mohawk held together with soap suds upon his head. In short, he looked completely unprepared to face the man with whom he was infatuated. 

“I’m here!” Eren shouted in reply, swiftly ducking his head down and splashing water up over his head to rinse his hair, in a panic. 

“In the back, here?” came Levi’s voice again, attempting to ascertain Eren’s location, and sounding far too close for Eren’s nonexistent level of preparedness. 

“Yeah, but don’t come in, I’m not decent!”

“What?” Levi rounded the corner, and stepped into the room, evidently not having heard Eren’s last statement. 

Eren let out a sound that bordered on a shriek and hunkered down in the tub, getting as much of himself under the now mostly opaque soapy water as possible, which as it turned out, wasn’t a whole lot of himself. It covered the most important parts though, which was something. While Eren was certainly not averse to showing said parts to Levi at some point, preferably with the right romantic atmosphere, he was certain that the time for it was decidedly not right now. 

“Sorry,” Levi said with a poorly concealed chuckle, as he averted his eyes, managing to apologize without even a hint of sincerity. 

“Yeah, right,” Eren replied moodily, “now go away so I can get out of the tub.”

“You got a towel?” Levi asks, looking back to Eren and, mercifully, choosing to maintain direct eye-contact rather than letting his eyes wander ungentlemanly downwards. 

“Uh …”

“You don’t have a towel.”

“Well, no, I don’t own one,” Eren said awkwardly before elaborating, “I kind of just count on the fact that I’ll air dry eventually.”

Levi gave a long-suffering sigh, and turned, heading for the door.

“Wait here, you heathen,” he commanded, taking his leave and leaving Eren sitting in rapidly-cooling water, feeling more than a little confused, especially as Eren heard Levi’s footsteps ascending the stairs.

He didn’t have to wait long before Levi returned, tossing a large piece of fluffy cloth in his direction.

“You can have that one. I own another,” Levi said, adopting a casual air that Eren suspected to be somewhat forced, followed by a muttered, but fond, “Savage boy.”

“Oh, thanks, Levi!” Eren said cheerily, sending a wide grin in Levi’s direction, though ever conscious of the mildly embarrassing scenario in which he still found himself. 

“It’s fine,” Levi replied offhandedly, turning back to the door, this time appearing fully intent on leaving to go upstairs for the night, “You finish up down here. I’ll be waiting upstairs.”

“Your room?” Eren asked, heart fluttering.

“Yes,” Levi answered simply, whisking his way out of the storeroom and up the stairs, into the darkness of the hallway on the floor above.

Eren heard the creaking of footsteps on floorboards, followed by the quiet click of a door closing, no doubt Levi’s bedroom door. He listened for a moment more to make sure that he was indeed alone before standing and stepping out of the tub, shivering slightly from the cool nighttime air as he stooped to pick up the towel and begin drying off. 

The towel smelled like Levi, that was Eren’s first thought, and an embarrassing one at that. The cloth was plush, not like just any cloth with absorbent qualities, but it seemed to be one of those new factory-made looped-cotton ones, terrycloth ones. Hard to get in these parts, considering that they first started making them in England, and all the American factories were in the East. But Levi was not one to shy away from difficulties or expense when it came to acquiring the finer things. It stood to reason that he wouldn’t skimp when it came to bathroom linen either. 

If Levi hadn't grown up poor and apparently murdered at least one person, from what little Eren had heard of Levi's youth, Eren might have been tempted to call the man pretentious. 

Eren dried himself briskly, eager to get upstairs. Unfortunately, there are only twenty-four hours in any given day, and this day was quickly drawing to its close, his opportunity to spend time with Levi running out. Once dry enough to pull his pants on without them sticking to his legs and making the mechanics of dressing unnecessarily difficult, Eren dressed quickly and dragged the tub out the back door to pour out the water before returning the tub to its hook on the wall. 

Bringing the lamp that had illuminated the storeroom as he bathed along with him, Eren headed up the stairs, stepping lightly and keeping to the edge of steps, close to the wall, which he had found to significantly reduce the chance of stairs creaking underfoot. The boards creaked gently as he stepped into the hall, but the sound soon faded, eclipsed by the quiet cacophony of conflicting sounds that emerged from beneath the doors of the various rented rooms. Snoring, for the most part. Most of the rooms were also dark, but Eren could see a soft warm light spilling out from under the door to Levi’s room. Levi was waiting for him.

Eren stood before the door, neglecting to turn the knob out of hesitation, his hand hovering just above the scuffed metal. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to go in, it was that, well, he wasn’t entirely sure what exactly he was walking into. He wanted to get closer to Levi, emotionally and, needless to say, physically, but what exactly that would entail was knowledge that as yet escaped him. The basic mechanics of such things were relatively simple, something Eren could pretty much figure out by guessing … but he was certain that his “common sense” guessing was probably missing something important. 

He knew Levi would probably tell him anything he wanted to know, likely in the bluntest possible terms, but Eren hardly even knew what questions to ask. And it would no doubt be terribly embarrassing, enough to engender Eren’s current reluctance.

As Eren stood there in front of the door, a shadow appeared, blocking out the light streaming from underneath, and the rough wood swung slowly inward, revealing Levi standing on the other side.

“There you are,” the man said quietly, smiling as he stepped aside to let Eren cross the threshold.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Slight sexcapades next update. Just a heads up. And potentially an announcement that will encourage y'all to return.


	12. Midnight Rendezvous

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eren and Levi meet up in Levi's room for their planned romantic interlude, however, unknown to them, trouble looms on the horizon ...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Heads-up, just in case anyone is uninformed: there are minor sexcapades in this chapter, lacking in any kinkiness, that is, unless self-doubt followed by reassurance is your kink. In that case, I got you, yo. The chapter is also about twice the usual length, so have fun with that.
> 
> Full disclosure: smut is most definitely not my strong suit when it comes to writing, starting as I did as a suspense/horror writer, but I have done my best and I hope that it does not disappoint.

As the door closed softly behind him with a quiet click, Eren found himself pulled into a warm embrace as Levi brought him close, a hand reaching up to tilt Eren’s face downward the better to receive a much-awaited kiss. 

It was funny, Eren always managed to forget just how much shorter Levi was than himself. The man projected such a dominant air, possessed of such self-confidence as to make one forget his stature. While he may physically have been short, he gave the impression of always being the tallest man in any given room. A force of nature in a small package.

When they had kissed before, it had been dark, and they had both been sitting down, so the difference in height hadn’t been nearly so pronounced, but now that they stood, chest to chest, lips to lips, Eren could feel the slight strain in his neck as he bent to accept Levi’s kiss. If he looked down, he thought, he might have been able to see Levi standing up on his tip toes, but he knew that it would be most unwise to take that look, and even more unwise to mention it to the man. Not if he wished for more kisses. 

Levi kept it infuriatingly chaste and they parted before long, Levi stepping back slightly to give Eren a little room, though his hand lingered at the back of Eren’s neck for a moment before sliding down his arm and, a little reluctantly, if Eren was any judge, releasing him.

“Sit down,” Levi said abruptly, gesturing to his bed, which was just as pristinely made as Eren would have expected, with bedlinen of the highest quality, stitched with delicate embroidery at the edges of the sheets and pillowcases.

“I have something for you”, he continued, turning away to face the small desk that occupied one corner of his room. 

He slid a drawer open and retrieved an object, a small box, Eren discovered, as Levi turned back to Eren, moving to sit beside him on the bed. Eren couldn’t help but grin in poorly-hidden excitement as Levi pressed the box into his hand, earning a small smile from Levi in return. 

“What is it?” Eren asked, fingers caressing the ribbon that had been wrapped around the box in a pleasing little bow. Eren had of course, after receiving Levi’s note that morning, been expecting a gift, but that in no way dulled the anticipation that he felt upon seeing the small package. 

“Just telling you flat out rather defeats the purpose of my wrapping it up, don’t you think?” Levi shot back teasingly, “Go on, just open it.”

Eren didn’t have to be told twice. He pulled the ribbon with eager fingers, undoing the bow, and moved to remove the lid from the box, revealing tissue paper, which Eren then quickly ripped away to reveal Levi’s present for him.

“Levi,” Eren breathed out in something between awe and disbelief, “You bought me a …”

“A pocket watch, yes. I’ve seen you ogling mine and I thought you might like to have a pocket watch of your own. Besides,” Levi added with a huff of laughter, “it might help you keep track of time, help you stay punctual.”

Eren got the distinct feeling that Levi was referring to the incident earlier, when Eren had still been in the tub at the moment of Levi’s arrival, but he couldn’t be bothered to tell Levi off about it, still too stunned at the gesture he had just been shown.

The pocket watch shone brilliantly in the soft, warm lantern light of Levi’s room, a beautiful finish of polished gold reflecting the glow, projecting flecks of golden light onto the skin of Eren’s hands as he held it.   
“I thought of having it engraved,” Levi said all too casually, “but I thought that might have been a bit much.”

“A bit much?” Eren exclaimed, still bewildered by the extravagance of it, “Levi, this must have cost a fortune!”

“Well, yes,” Levi responded, matter-of-factly, “But I have a fortune, and I don’t have any qualms about spending a bit of it on you.”

“But …”

“No buts,” Levi chided gently, reaching out to gently close Eren’s fingers around the watch, where it rested in his palm, “I’m rich and eccentric, just let me spoil you.”

A hot blush flooded across Eren’s face and he said the only thing he could think of to say to something like that:

“Thank you, Levi.”

“Don’t mention it,” Levi answered dismissively, as if the gift had merely been a whim, something of little import, but there was a tilt to his lips that told Eren that Levi was pleased. Flustered even, Eren might have said, had he not known better. 

Thought had gone into this gift, whether Levi would admit it or not, and Eren found the gesture ever so touching. Levi didn’t truly care about much in this life, but he’d cared enough to find Eren a present, and cared enough to be pleased by Eren’s acceptance of it. The more time he spent with Levi, the more he found Levi’s initial inscrutability to be false. The man could be read like a book if only one knew his language. 

The cold-hearted bastard thing was certainly no mere act, but there was more to him than that. Eren wondered, briefly, if anyone else had ever seen beyond the icy exterior of Levi, and, if no one had, had it made Levi feel terribly lonely? Eren had been hiding himself from the world his whole life, but, until recently, he’d at least had Mikasa and Armin, two people in the world who had perceived, and accepted, Eren as he truly was. Had Levi had his own Mikasa or Armin at any point in his life? Eren recalled with clarity how lonesome he’d felt, even with Mikasa and Armin as company, and he could hardly imagine the loneliness that might creep into one’s soul when left entirely alone in the world. Perhaps Levi was just as glad, if not more so than Eren, that the two of them had managed to fortuitously stumble into each other in the vastness of the universe.

Eren put the pocket watch carefully back into its box and set it on the bed to his side, leaving the space between himself and Levi open for him to slide closer, to pull Levi in for another enthusiastic kiss. Unlike the simple, chaste peck on the lips that Levi had granted him when he’d first entered the room, this one deepened as Eren pressed closer, arms coming up around Levi’s shoulders to pull the man ever closer.

He opened his mouth slightly against Levi’s lips, a not-so-subtle hint that Levi wasted no time in following, letting his tongue swipe across Eren’s lower lip, swallowing Eren’s sigh. It was as if the temperature in the room had suddenly and drastically increased, and yet Eren felt no desire to shy away from the warmth of Levi’s body, as one would generally do to a source of heat in hot weather. Rather, he wanted to get closer to that heat; even were it to burn him, he wouldn’t be inclined to turn away. Time seemed to have both sped up and slowed down at once, and he only realizes that he’d moved to straddle Levi’s lap, his hands in the man’s hair, his chest brushing Levi’s own with each heavy, panting breath he took between kisses, when Levi himself pulled away, two strong hands holding Eren back as he tried to pursue Levi’s retreating lips.

“Eren, wait a minute.”

“Huh?” Eren breathed heavily, trying to catch breath that he hadn’t really even realized he’d lost.

“You know that we don’t have to do this right now, right? And you don’t owe me anything …”

Oh? Oh. Eren’s first thought was to be offended that Levi didn’t think he knew his own mind, that Levi could even begin to entertain the thought that Eren was doing this out of gratitude for the gift of the pocket watch and no more, but given a moment to think as he tried to slow his breathing back to normal, he reconsidered. Levi knew Eren was capable of making his own decisions, he’d made that clear enough when they’d first talked about getting romantically involved with each other. Levi just wanted Eren to be sure.

And, when Eren reexamined himself, he found that he wasn’t sure. He wanted Levi, in the physical sense, he did, but he couldn’t truthfully say that he knew how much he was ready for. Perhaps slowing down would be the better thing to do, after all, Eren being impulsive did not, as past experience would demonstrate, generally end in peaches and cream. He took a deep, grounding breath.

“I know we don’t have to,” he said, fighting against the embarrassment that threatened to rise into his throat and prevent his speech, “But I do want to …”

Levi ran his hands soothingly up and down Eren’s back, gazing up into Eren’s eyes with an open expression as he asked, “What do you want, Eren?”

“Um …” Eren dithered, knowing what he wanted only in the vaguest of terms, but not with any clarity, “I’m not sure … I want …”

His eyes flickered away from Levi’s own, unable to say what he wanted to say while engaging in direct eye-contact, somehow feeling more exposed by that than by having Levi’s tongue in his mouth. Who’d have thought? 

Now staring resolutely at Levi’s chin, Eren managed to work up the courage to say, “I want you to touch me. Don’t ask me precisely how, but, um, I want your skin against mine. As much as is possible.”

A sound escaped Levi’s throat then, a sound that, under any other circumstances, he might have called a whine, as Levi lunged up to steal another kiss from Eren’s already kiss-reddened lips. Pulling away with a wet pop, Levi offered a suggestion.

“How about we try a few things, and we’ll see how it goes? If you don’t like something, we can stop,” he said, voice low, as Eren felt Levi’s hot breath against his neck, eliciting the most delightful shiver. 

He could practically hear Levi’s smirk as the man added as if it were an afterthought, though Eren was certain it was more calculated than that, “And if we find something that you really like, I can make you beg for more. How does that sound, Eren?”

The way that Levi said his name did things to Eren, things that he couldn’t think to explain and didn’t really desire to, content instead to revel in it, in the way Levi’s lips trailed over his collarbones, just the right kind of ticklish, causing goosebumps to flood over his skin.

“Yes,” Eren hissed out, digging his hands back into Levi’s hair and directing the man to face upwards once again so Eren could moan his consent into Levi’s mouth.

It all sounded good to him, indescribably good. The thought of Levi driving him to the point of madness with some as-yet unknown pleasure made his heart race, and he began to rock in Levi’s lap, pressing himself closer and providing them both with the friction they craved. 

Eren would never, previously, have considered the thought of himself begging for anything, let alone finding satisfaction in it. Begging was a negative thing, generally speaking, something to be pitied, but now that Levi had promised to make Eren beg by means of carnal pleasure, Eren could think of nothing more tantalizing. Every day with Levi was a learning experience in some way or another, but Eren found himself looking forward to this particular lesson more than any other.

Eren shivered involuntarily as he felt Levi’s hand roam under the hem of his shirt, warm hands skimming across the skin, trailing up the length of Eren’s spine. He felt a brief moment of self-consciousness the moment that Levi’s wandering hands brushed across a scar or two, ones that he’d gained on his journey west in an incident involving Eren’s lack of knowledge surrounding the proper way to disembark from a moving train. 

He’d seen some other disreputable travelers, not unlike himself, alight from the train car, landing safely upon the ground, and Eren had thought that, after observing the others, he’d be able to do it too. Alas, he was very much mistaken, and his impact with the hard ground and an assortment of dry tumbleweeds that had scratched viciously at every bit of uncovered skin, managing to leave him covered in bloody abrasions, even under his clothes. The skin had healed as best as it could be expected to, but it did not leave Eren unmarked, patches of coarse skin remaining all this time later. He knew them to be not very visible, but the contrasting texture of the skin was less easy to ignore. 

And, all the physical injuries aside, it had been really quite embarrassing. He’d never been laughed at by a ragged assortment of train hobos before …

This moment of self-consciousness was fleeting however, as Levi’s hands didn’t pause in their caressing of Eren’s skin, the man giving no sign at all that he’d even felt the difference in texture, let alone that he’d been the slightest bit bothered by it. It was so reassuring, the lack of a reaction from Levi, much in the way that Levi hadn’t given much of a reaction to Eren’s confession of murder. Levi just disregarded all the right things.

It was so strange, the difference between having one’s own hands upon one’s body, and having someone else’s. Levi had hardly done anything yet, and yet he’d elicited reactions that Eren couldn’t have gotten from touching himself, regardless of the … enthusiasm Eren might put into his efforts. Having Levi touching him resulted in an enthusiasm of an entirely different kind, not merely the usual selfish desire for a moment of his own pleasure, but Eren found himself desiring Levi’s pleasure just as much. He shivered not just from Levi’s touch, but from each small moan Levi let slip from between his lips as the two of them indulged in each other. 

Levi’s right hand left its place on Eren’s back and slid around to the front, where his fingers brushed gently over one of Eren’s nipples, and … Gosh … Eren hadn’t known that was a thing, but now that he did, it was impossible to ignore. 

Eren let out a sound, of a much higher pitch than he would have expected, and he could feel Levi’s little self-satisfied grin against his neck as the man doubled his efforts, flicking his thumb across Eren’s nipple in a manner that brought such little gasps from his throat with every passing of the digit over Eren’s warm flesh, much to Levi’s apparent satisfaction. 

The smug little bastard.

“Like you’re one to talk,” came the muffled reply, and it was only then that Eren realized he’d spoken aloud. 

If he were to ever figure out something that brings Levi embarrassment like that with which he constantly torments Eren, he’s going to milk it for all it’s worth, that’s for sure. Give the man a taste of his own medicine. 

“Shut up,” Eren replied in a sulking tone that didn’t truly match his feelings, distracted as he was by Levi’s hands and mouth, diverting his attention from anything else. 

“Make me,” Levi retorted, nipping at the skin over Eren’s collarbone with his teeth.

In all honesty, Eren didn’t know what else he could have expected in reply. Not only was Levi a smug bastard, but he was also an obstinate one, and provocation was rather his métier. That being said, Eren himself was also as stubborn as a mule, and he had no intention of not taking Levi up on his challenge. 

Needing no further invitation, Eren seized Levi’s mouth once again with his own, rolling his hips down hard into Levi’s own beneath him, practically basking in the groan he received in return, his reward for his decisive action. The satisfaction he felt at wiping that smug grin off of Levi’s face was not to be underestimated. 

Eren had, however, as was almost instantly revealed to him, underestimated the effect that such a move would have on Levi, and he let out a surprised shout as he found himself suddenly deposited onto the bed, falling backwards until his spine made contact with the embroidered sheets. Levi hovered above him, continuing his enthusiastic efforts on Eren’s neck and chest, and while Eren had certainly imagined the two of them in just such a position, and had found the image most enticing, just now it felt a bit … too much. He could feel his heart beat increasing in speed, but just now it was not out of excitement, but out of a dash of unexpected fear.

He cursed himself for the feeling, intent on going on despite the growing unpleasant, mad fluttering of butterfly wings that he could feel rising in the pit of his stomach. This is something he’d wanted, something he’d fantasized about, so why should he freeze now, when he was on the verge of getting what he desired? 

Levi must have sensed something in Eren’s manner, some tensing of the muscles that communicated his sudden hesitance, and the man sat up, backing away from Eren where he lay upon the bed. Eren both hated and appreciated the gesture, at once wanting a little space, but also wanting to get closer still. It was such a contradictory emotion, and Eren raised his hands to cover his eyes, grimacing in frustration. 

“Are you all right, Eren?” Levi asked gently, a tentative hand reaching out to softly touch Eren’s elbow, a calming, reassuring gesture.

“Yes, I’m fine, I just …” Eren’s reply tapered off, unsure of how to explain his sudden change.

“Too much?” Levi asked, maintaining his unaggressive, non-judgmental tone. 

Eren almost hated him for it. It was as if Levi had read his mind, as if Levi understood the workings of Eren’s mind even better than Eren himself did. How dare Levi be so calm and reasonable, when Eren himself couldn’t be?

He nodded in affirmation, hands still covering his eyes, now in embarrassment as much as in frustration, not trusting himself to speak.

“Would you like to stop?”

Eren considered it. Would he like to stop? The rising sense of mortification at his own reaction said yes, but apart from that, Eren was still very much in the mood, if his discomfort below the belt was anything to go by. It was just their current position that had thrown him off. He pulled his hands away from his face and did his best to look Levi in eye, with only moderate success.

“No, I’m all right, I just … I’m sorry … I don’t know what’s come over me …”

Levi reached out to take Eren’s hand.

“It’s perfectly fine, Eren,” he said consolingly, “How about we sit back up, like we were before?”

Eren couldn’t help but smile. While Levi’s apparent mind reading could be infuriating, it was also rather comforting that Eren didn’t necessarily always have to vocalize his needs for them to be met. Someday, Eren thought, he’d like to learn to do the same for Levi. The man appeared indestructible, both physically and mentally, but Eren knew that that couldn’t really be true, that sometimes even Levi would need someone to be there for him. Eren would dearly like to be that someone.

He took Levi’s proffered hand and let the man help him up, recreating the position they’d been in before uncertainty had struck. The mood returned in full, however, this time there was a greater sense of sentimentality, a much more palpable feeling of affection in the air around them. Eren’s regret over his moment of weakness faded. Perhaps this was a good thing, a moment of vulnerability that allowed a deeper understanding to enfold between them, and a reassurance that Eren didn’t need to fulfill any expectations, for Levi had none for him to fulfill. 

Eren made the first move to start things up again, leaning in for a kiss, slower and sweeter than those they’d previously shared. Eren hoped that it communicated his sentiments effectively enough that Levi might understand his gratitude. 

Levi let Eren lead this time, let him set the pace, and it wasn’t long before the heat and the urgency began to build up once again, caresses leaving sensations like sparks across their skin. Hands wandered, slowly making their way lower as their upper bodies were fully explored, and, in a moment of desire-inspired bravery, Eren let his hand move to rest on Levi’s own where it rested on his thigh, gently directing it upwards, a silent indication of what he’d like Levi to do.

“I’m fine, I promise,” Eren assured preemptively, seeing the beginnings of concern appearing in Levi’s cool grey eyes, “I do want this.”

Levi smiled softly in return, but the sweetness in it quickly gave way to smugness, as was typical of him, as he moved to do as Eren had suggested, sliding his hand teasingly over the fabric of Eren’s trousers to knead gently between his thighs.

“Oh-” Eren let out a choked off sound, a hand going out to steady himself against Levi’s shoulder, biting his lip to keep further sounds at bay. It was an easy thing to forget, but Eren was still conscious of the need to remain discreet, for both his own sake and Levi’s.

“May I?” Levi asked seductively, one hand toying with the buttons on the front of Eren’s trousers, while the other gently tugged down the front of Eren’s shirt, making way for Levi to leave a sucking kiss below where the collar would usually rest. Discretion again, Eren’s mind hazily supplied.

“Uh-huh, please” Eren replied in the best approximation of an actual answer that he could hope to provide in that instant.

Levi obliged, flicking open the fastenings with a finesse that only Levi could hope to manage in such a situation as this, the suave bastard that he was, and Eren was struck with relief at the sudden disappearance of pressure that the unforgiving cloth of his trousers had been inflicting upon him. After a moment’s hesitation, in which Eren saw, through eyes half-closed in anticipatory desire, Levi hesitate, glancing up again to Eren’s face to ensure that all remained well, Eren felt a warm hand slip beneath the fabric. 

“Mmm …” Eren let out a muffled moan at the intimate touch of skin on skin as Levi took a moment to tease, to acclimate Eren to the sensation of being touched by another person on a part of the body that had only ever been touched by Eren himself. 

Clearly spurred on by Eren’s reaction, Levi went ahead and grasped him firmly, at which point Eren had to bring a hand up to cover his mouth, to stifle the noises that he knew he couldn’t hold back, but that he couldn’t risk being heard from out in the hallway. This really was something else. Eren had done this for himself on more than one occasion, but it hadn’t prepared him for the sensation of Levi stroking him while peppering kisses over every inch of available skin.

Though Eren’s fantasies tended to be a bit more … avant-garde … he found that he liked the reality of it better. There was an emotional component that his naughtier dreams hadn’t done justice, and Eren found that it made all the difference, heightening the sensations beyond what physical contact alone could elicit.

It was probably that very thing that caused Eren to find himself approaching the end more quickly than usual, pawing desperately at Levi, his hands grasping the man’s clothing with a greedy fervor as he chased the pleasure that Levi was bringing him. He found himself rutting into Levi’s hand, much to Levi’s apparent satisfaction as the man groaned in response to the sounds emerging from Eren’s own throat. He didn’t realize that his volume had been increasing until Levi’s mouth covered his own, swallowing the sound before it could escape into the still night air. 

Levi did something then with his thumb, Eren couldn’t accurately say what, but it had been fantastic, that pushed him over the edge into his release, collapsing against Levi’s frame as he rode it out, panting hot breaths into the skin where Levi’s neck met his shoulder. 

As the intensity of sensation faded and Eren’s pulse and breathing slowed to a more normal pace, he was struck by the realization that he’d entirely neglected Levi during this whole … exchange … and he pulled back, reaching a hand down with the intent of taking care of Levi as Levi had taken care of him. He was surprised to discover, however, that Levi’s other hand, the one that hadn’t been engaged in bringing Eren pleasure, was already resting there. Not only that, but there was a certain telltale dampness that told Eren that there was nothing left for him to do there, and Eren looked back up to Levi’s face, surprised.

“You already …?” 

“Yeah,” Levi answered, his hands now busying themselves with retrieving a handkerchief from his waistcoat pocket to swiftly clean his hands, covered as they were in bodily fluid that Eren, now that the passion had released its grip on him, didn’t dare dwell on, for fear of blushing so hard he might combust. 

“Just from that?” Eren asked, slightly disbelieving that a man with such experience as Eren supposed Levi to have would find release that quickly merely rubbing himself through his trousers while stroking an inexperienced and really rather average looking young man like Eren. It was … rather flattering, really, to know that he could have such an effect on the man.

“Yes,” came the brusque response, in something that Eren might even venture to call embarrassment. And oh, if that wasn’t tremendously satisfying …

“So, you don’t need me to-?” Eren was pushing his luck and he knew it, but he simply couldn’t resist the temptation.

“No, now shut up,” 

“Okay, okay,” Eren chuckled, discreetly tucking himself back into his trousers and doing up the buttons. 

He sat there for a moment, silently observing Levi as the man tidied himself up, then tossed the now soiled handkerchief into a nearby wicker basket, which Eren could now assume to be a laundry hamper. Levi was nothing if not fastidious. 

Having discarded the handkerchief, Levi looked back to Eren and, upon meeting his eyes, his expression softened, in the way that it only ever did when they were alone together. He then leaned in for a soft kiss, which Eren happily returned. As they parted, however, Levi let out a sigh.

“I can’t express how much I’d like for you to stay here with me tonight,” he began, the regret audible in his delivery of the words. 

Eren knew what was coming next, and he reminded himself not to get upset with Levi for the suggestion. He knew well that Levi was not trying to get rid of him, merely that Levi had to keep their situation and both of their best interests in mind. It stung that Eren couldn’t stay, couldn’t sleep alongside Levi until the morning, but he knew the reasons behind it, and he knew that there was no arguing against them.

“But I can’t,” Eren said, finishing Levi’s thought for him.

“No,” Levi affirmed, a hand coming up to gently brush the skin of Eren’s cheek, “I’m afraid not. I’m sorry, Eren.”

“Don’t be sorry,” Eren insisted, not wanting Levi to feel bad for simply doing what had to be done, “I know how it has to be.”

He stood up from the bed, recognizing that he’d best get to his own bed soon if he intended to get any amount of sleep that night, and aware of Levi having the same need. It was as if his shoes doubled, tripled in weight as he stepped away from Levi’s bed and towards the door, so powerful was his reluctance to leave. Upon reaching the door, Eren turned back to Levi where the man still sat upon the edge of the bed, head turned to watch Eren’s departure.

“Goodnight, Levi,” he said fondly, consoling himself with the fact that, while he might have to part from the man now, it would not be long until he’d have Levi’s singular company once again.

“Goodnight, Eren,” Levi responded, and Eren could swear that he could hear his own thoughts echoed back in the undertones of Levi’s words, the thought that they wouldn’t have to wait long until they could have this again. 

Knowing that the longer he dawdled, the harder walking out would be, Eren opened Levi’s door, peering out furtively to be sure that the coast was clear before stepping out into the hallway on cautious tip toes, closing the door behind him with a quiet click. Once back in his bedroom, Eren made quick work of preparing for bed and settled down to rest, a silly smile making its way onto his face now that he found himself the privacy of his own room. Sleep came for him quickly, drawing him into a calm, dreamless slumber, free of all worries or cares. 

However, unknown to Levi and entirely forgotten by Eren, the piece of paper upon which Levi had written his note, the piece of paper which Eren had meant to destroy, was no longer where he’d put it, no longer crumpled in the pocket of his trousers …

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Eren done fucked up, folks ... Acting with discretion gets you nowhere if your secret notes to each other go walkabout ...


	13. Dead of Night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Something is wrong in town, a dangerous stirring amongst the townspeople, and Eren and Levi have to make the difficult decision to leave the town they had begun to think of as home. They'll leave tomorrow, but all sorts of things can happen in a day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, I am, as ever, unpredictable and unable to stick to any semblance of a timetable. I've got the next chapter half-written already though, so I should be posting that before New Years. 
> 
> I still feel weird about doing this, but I made myself a Ko-fi account so if you would like to support my works, and are able, I'd appreciate it if you would consider buying me a cup of coffee :) Here's the link to my page: http://ko-fi.com/A6763TLC

People looked at him differently the next day. And the day after. And the day after that. 

It was as if Eren moved in a bubble, isolated from the world even as he walked through it. It was strangely quiet, even in the bar, where the sound of glasses clinking and the occasional fistfight typically filled the space with a perpetual noise. Oddly few people were there, only the most hardened of alcoholics, and even they didn’t meet Eren’s eye when he poured them their drinks.

That Sunday, an unusual number of people went to church in lieu of the saloon.

Something was wrong.

In a sort of blind panic, Eren had left the bar when Mr. Campbell had announced he’d be going out for a minute or two, making a bee-line for the local bulletin board which rested in the shadow of the overhanging roof of the general store building. If anyone needed anything one of the neighbors might be willing to lend or sell, they’d post an advert on the board and, in the event that some wanted criminal may be lurking in the region, wanted posters would hang alongside the more innocuous postings. 

There was one old sign for a cattle rustler, one that had long faded and worn with time and the blasting of desert sand carried on the wind, but nothing else, nothing that should give Eren any reason to fear. He breathed a short-lived sigh of relief upon reassuring himself that his own wanted posters hadn’t yet gotten this far west, but his breath caught again as he was left still with no clues as to what had changed to elicit this unnerving quiet.

This quiet, pervasive fear of the unknown was far more disconcerting than the gut-gnawing fear of discovery that he’d grown accustomed to. 

He managed to get back to the saloon and behind the bar just before Mr. Campbell’s return, sliding in to begin vigorously scrubbing the -for once- not in fact sticky countertop. There was something odd with Mr. Campbell too, something about the way he moved, the way his eyes kept flitting to observe Eren, but never lingered upon his face. The man had never been the type to skirt around a subject, or indeed anything else; Eren had seen him quite literally try to walk through someone who had been standing in his way, rather than going around. But now he stood by the bar, looking very much as though he had something to say and hadn’t yet decided how to say it. 

“Are you alright, sir?” Eren asked, visibly unsettled.

“Everything’s fine, son,” Mr. Campbell replied hurriedly, busying his hands with sorting the liquor bottles on the shelf, his back turned to where Eren stood.

Eren, seeing his boss’s closed off stance, chose to turn away, back to the unoccupied counter but the sound of Mr. Campbell clearing his throat, as if preparing to speak prompted him to reverse the motion.

“Sir?” he ventured after a moment of silence..

“Tongues can wag cruel in a small town like ours,” the man began after a pause, “and rumors have a life of their own. They can cause all kinds of behavior from otherwise reasonable folk.”

“Sir?” Eren asked again, confused and filled with a rising sense of dread.

"You’re being careful ain’t you?”

“Careful?”

“Coming out here to the edge of civilization, a man can forget the proper way of things, can get into all sorts of trouble. You ain’t getting into trouble, right?”

“I … I try not to, sir,” Eren stuttered, not entirely sure what specifically Mr. Campbell is talking about, but with everything that he’s got to hide swirling to the forefront of his mind, clouding it with fear. 

“You’re great friends with Levi Ackerman, ain’t you?”

“We get along, sir.”

“I’m glad about that, but be sure you don’t get too friendly, all right?” he said earnestly, making proper eye contact for the first time since he came back to the bar, “Now, I know that you’re a good lad, not one to get into strife, but others may not know that. Folks might make assumptions, if you don’t watch yourself. Are you understanding me?”

“I think so, sir,” Eren said, feeling his stomach sink even lower than he would have thought possible. 

“Good lad,” Mr. Campbell said, appearing as relieved at the fact that the conversation had ended as at Eren’s answer, “Now why don’t you go out back and chop some wood for the stove. Got a couple big logs out there that need paring down. I’ll take care of the bar.”   
“Yessir,” Eren affirmed immediately, leaping at the opportunity to escape to relative privacy, where he might be able to gather his thoughts a bit.

He hurried out to the back of the saloon, an area half enclosed by the windowless side of the general store and isolated from every other angle by barren, rocky terrain. There were some hills not far off that hid the horizon, themselves obscured by the purplish haze of distance and dust in the waning light of early evening. Stepping out the back door, he reached for the axe handle, the tool itself buried by the blade in a stump. 

Eren wouldn’t have thought that a large tree could ever have grown there, the ground dry and full of stones as it was, now too inhospitable for more than the occasional scraggly weed to grow, but it clearly had at some point. It must have been cut down some years ago, judging from the weathered look of the thing. Trees still grew off in the hills, Eren could just about see them over expanse of land that separated him from true wilderness, but they hadn’t grown here in some time. They’d likely all been turned into houses, the general store, and the saloon, this sad lump of wood impaled by an axe now all that remained in the ground of the forest that had stretched all the way out here. 

What trees Eren could still see probably wouldn’t last much longer either, as the railroads made their way further and further west, chewing up the land. A bit sad to think about, really, how fleeting even the most permanent-seeming things are. Landscapes change, colors and shapes constantly shifting the the great kaleidoscope of time, only fractured images left to tell the tale of all the things that came before. People change much the same.  

Perhaps he’ll ask Levi if the trees had been here when he’d first arrived, or whether they’d already been turned into buildings by then.

Levi … Eren’s going to have to talk to him. He hadn’t been given any specifics, but Eren could be sure that people at least suspected the nature of his and Levi’s relationship, even if they might be lacking in actual evidence. But, as Levi would tell him, mobs don’t generally need evidence, they just go ahead regardless. 

All of a sudden, the danger is much less a theoretical possibility and more of an imminent threat. 

Eren pulled the axe from its place in the stump, grabbing a large piece of wood from the woodpile stacked by the door and setting it down where he could take a proper swing at it. As he lifted the axe, bringing it down with a solid thwacking sound, another sound rang out, a voice that Eren had become plenty familiar with over the past weeks.

“Well, what a surprise to see you here!” Levi called out in jest, the hand that he dramatically places against his chest the only real indication that he was joking, his face just as stoic as ever.

Eren couldn’t help but smile, fondness getting the better of him, despite this new and particularly distracting fear. Being with Levi always made him feel a bit invincible, like they could take on the world in its entirety if only they were together. The truth, however, he knew to be different.   
No amount of love can stop a bullet in flight. 

Levi must have sensed something, a true seriousness coming over him as he walked across the dirt to stand by Eren’s side. 

“What’s the matter, baby?” He asked, quietly, his mouth hardly moving as he inconspicuously uttered the words.

“We can’t go to each other’s rooms tonight, Levi,” Eren whispered back, acting as though still absorbed in the work of chopping wood, “If they don’t already know, they suspect us. Mr. Campbell warned me today.”

“Well, now, that is a problem,” Levi muttered in response with a calmness that would have fooled anyone but Eren. He was troubled, Eren could tell.

“I’ll stay late to close up tonight, tell Mr. Campbell that I want to get things in proper order before the new shipment of liquor comes in,” Eren said conspiratorially, willing himself to remain as calm as Levi looked, “Once everyone is settled in for the night, you come join me back in the kitchen. If anyone intercepts you, you can always appear to be heading to the outhouse; everyone should know by now your feelings about chamber pots.”

“That they are little better than shitting into your own hat?”

“Exactly. You going out at night won’t be questioned the way another person would be,” Eren affirmed. 

“Sounds like a plan,” Levi said, turning an about face and striding away around to the front of the building, his hand gently brushing Eren’s own for a split second before they parted.

Funny how such a little thing could send Eren’s heart aflutter, even as he knew it could spell disaster. Glancing quickly around, Eren found himself comforted by the fact that there was no one within eyeshot; he could see no one, which reassuringly meant that no one could have seen himself and Levi just then. They could assume themselves safe, for the night at least. 

He continued on with chopping wood until he had a sizable load of pieces small enough for the stove in the saloon kitchen, well, what passed for a kitchen. He knelt down on the floor, the grain of it catching at his trousers, and opened to stove door to stoke up the fire, to keep it going for the night. They generally kept it going all night, at least as burning embers, so that they wouldn’t have to go to the bother of starting it up again only a few hours later, when the sun rose. Tonight it would lend some light and some heat to the place while Levi and he talked strategy. They’d probably have to split … and it might have to be soon. 

Over the next hour or so, Eren wandered around the saloon, tidying what there was to be tidied, although the bar remained largely empty. A couple of hours before the usual time, Mr. Campbell told Eren to close up early, there not being enough traffic in the establishment to warrant the trouble of staying open. Once Mr. Campbell had retired to his own room, Eren put out the lamps and slunk back to the kitchen to wait for Levi, warming himself by the stove’s faintly glowing embers against the light chill of the night air. 

It was eerie, in the way that public areas always are when seen in the dead of night. Corners that one knows to be empty and harmless grow shadows, and the shadows seem to grow claws, wrapped in an unsettling quiet. There’s the sound of a creaking floorboard and Eren started for a moment before realizing that it was none other than Levi, emerging from the shadow into the warm glow from the stove. 

“Oh, Levi!” Eren exclaimed, more breathless than he’d generally like to admit from the sudden panic he’d felt at the sound of creaking wood, “I’m so glad that it’s you.”

“I did say I would come,” Levi replied, glancing about before selecting a barrel from against the wall, pulling it toward the stove and giving it a quick look over before taking a seat upon it, somehow managing to look as comfortable as if he were sitting upon a plush armchair, not a barrel of some mystery substance.

“You did … I didn’t even hear you coming down the stairs.”

“I am a thief by trade,” Levi reminds him, deadpan. 

It was a bit of a foolish observation to be honest. A career criminal, a thief in particular had best be able to descend as set of stairs without arousing suspicion. If he couldn’t, his career would no doubt prove to be awfully short.

“We’ve got to do something, Levi,” Eren began, getting to the main point of their meeting, “Mr. Campbell told me to watch myself. Said that he knows me to be a ‘good lad’ but the others don’t, and referenced some ‘assumptions’ being made about the two of us.”

“Did he now …”

“It wasn’t just what he said, but the way he said it,” Eren added with a desperate sort of urgency, “He thinks there’s danger to be found and I think he may be right.”

“Goddammit” Levi swore, as crude as expected, but unexpectedly animated in his doing so, the sudden vitriol a shock, “that new preacher has had everyone riled up over ‘the sinners and infidels’ for weeks, not surprising that they’re looking for an outlet for their self-righteous anger now.”

“He has?” Eren asks, “I haven’t been to church for a while …”

“I stop in sometimes, mostly to get a hint at some of the current gossip, and that man sure loves his fire and brimstone bullshit.”

“And he’s turned it on us now …” Eren muttered, gaze falling to the floor between his feet as the situation sinks in more and more.

“Looks like.”

“So, what are we going to do now, Levi?” Eren asked, raising his head again to look Levi in the eye. 

“I imagine that we’re going to have to take off in the next few days,” Levi mused, “before they can get angry enough to actually do something beyond talk. You should gather up the things you don’t want to leave here without.”

“Okay …” Eren could feel tears pricking a the corners of his eyes, trying and largely failing to hold them back.

“What’s wrong, baby?” Levi stands from his seat upon the barrel, moving to take Eren’s hands into his own.

“I just …” Eren hiccuped, doing his best to pull himself together, “this was just starting to become home to me. I’ve been here a long while now, and sure it was pretty lonely, but then you came along. Things were just starting to, you know, settle. They were just getting good.”

“I get it,” Levi said, bringing Eren into his embrace, smoothing a hand up and down Eren’s back, “but we can find somewhere else to call home. There’s plenty of towns out west, and there’s bound to be at least one that will be hospitable to two mysterious gentlemen with pockets full of illicit cash. We get ourselves a house, maybe, and then we can do as we like without fear, in our own place.”

“We could buy a house?” The question came out muffled from where Eren had bent, burying his face into the crook of Levi’s neck.

“I think you’ve forgotten who it is you’re talking to,” Levi chided gently, “Yes, we could absolutely buy a house.”

“Buying a house to live in together … that’s …”

“Too much? Too soon?”

Eren hesitated in responding and it didn’t escape Levi’s notice.

“I know we haven’t been together long,” the man said, “and now all this talk of essentially running away together … I can see how it would be a lot to take in. You need to leave here, for your own safety, and though you don’t have to go with me, I’d dearly love it if you did.”

“I do want to go with you,” Eren tightened his hold on Levi, eyes squeezing shut against the emotions that threatened to make them spill over, “and I will go with you. I’m just afraid, Levi.”

He laughed then, and it was a laugh with very little humor in it at all.

“I’m always afraid, Levi. I can’t remember when last I wasn’t, except when I’m alone with you, in your arms, in your bed. But I’ve never been able to stay there. I want to be able to sleep next to you without it being a risk to my life and yours.”

“I want that too, my love, I want that too,” Levi whispered to him soothingly, a hand going up to thread fingers through Eren’s hair, a gentle caress. 

“I just want to live my damn life in peace,” Eren’s voice broke as he uttered the words, “Is that too much to ask?”

“No,” Levi replied, turning his head to press a kiss to Eren’s cheek, “it is not too much to ask. But in this life, you’re going to have to fight hard for such a thing. Are you prepared to?”

Eren’s hands, grasping loosely as they were at Levi’s shirt sleeves, suddenly tightened, and Levi could hear the resolve behind the words as Eren spoke again.

“I’ll kill for it if I have to.”

“That’s my darling boy,” Levi whispers, voice dissipating into the thick, syrupy silence of a building in which only two souls remained awake, “that’s my boy.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, things will start picking up now ... by which I mean that the next chapter is when people start dying (not the main characters, I promise. We've got plenty of story to go yet). Y'all like a little murder in your fiction, right?


	14. Are You In There?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shit goes south and Eren and Levi have to take off quickly, but their flight isn't as easy as they had hoped. Levi sees a side of Eren that he hadn't witnessed before, and for the first time in a long time, he feels terror.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is where the graphic depictions of violence warning starts to come into play, so do be aware and cautious, dear readers. People die in this chapter. For once, though, I got the chapter out by the time I said I would, so that's exciting!
> 
> I'm gonna keep posting this, and I don't mean to solicit or to beg, I just really want to go to Sakura Con for the first time ever, and every dollar helps :) Still feels weird, but I made myself a Ko-fi account so if you would like to, and are able to support me, I'd appreciate it if you would consider buying me a cup of coffee :) Here's the link to my page: http://ko-fi.com/A6763TLC
> 
> Thank you, everyone!!

The next day passed in relative quiet. There was no clamoring of people inside the saloon, but neither did anyone remark to Eren how he’d best watch his step.

It wasn’t until night began to fall that the silence was broken.

“Eren!” came the call, a sort of whispered shout, as Levi burst into the room, closing the door quickly behind him, grabbing the chair in the corner of the room and dragging it across the floorboards with an agonizing scraping sound to shove it up against the door, wedged under the knob.

“Levi?” Eren gasped, confused and frightened, “What’s going on? I could hear shouting outside-”

He found himself cut off by Levi grabbing him and pulling him into aggressive hug, a disturbing sense of desperation radiating off of Levi in waves, the fear all the more for coming from a man who is not easily frightened.

“What’s happening, Levi?” He asked again, extracting himself from Levi’s grip to look the man in the eye.

“They’re coming for us, baby, we gotta go,” Levi said, passing Eren the bag that had been slung over his shoulder, “You grab anything you can’t bear to leave, and we’re gone in five minutes, all right?”

“They’re coming for us? Right now?” Eren stuttered in disbelief.

“You know how that new preacher has been spinning people up, Eren, they’re coming here with fucking torches, baby, we have to leave now!”

“What?” Eren breathed, voice breaking over the word.

It wasn’t a question, not really. He understood, but the concept, although not unpredicted, still boggled the mind a bit. He knew these people, he’d known them for over a year, and they’d known Levi even longer, but here they were, casting all that aside to come pounding on their door with pitchforks and voices shouting their ill-intent.

He’d sat in church with them, although he’d forgone the action in recent weeks, having had much more enjoyable things to do, in places that didn’t have palpable, simmering hate flowing in an undercurrent beneath the holy words.  

He’d served these food and drinks, and occasionally he’d received thanks for his time and trouble. He’d picked them up from the floor when they passed out drunk on unfinished boards, splinters working their way, unnoticed, into the fingers of their drunken, clumsy hands. He’d given them some plain water, or some coffee, to sober them up before sending them home.

He didn’t have to do that. He could just throw them out into the dirt, and sometimes he did, when they’d broken something or tried to start a fight, but if they hadn’t trespassed against the rules of the saloon, he’d help them up and send them safely home. He didn’t have to. But he did. He was nice, nicer than he had to be. Not just to win favor, to suppress his troubling past actions, to keep himself above suspicion. He did it to be someone better than the one who had fled here.

He’d helped neighbors with chores, run errands for them, wished them well when he passed them on the street. He was a good neighbor, if occasionally a bit clumsy. He tried.

He tried to fit in. He tried to be a part of the community. He’d tried with sincerity.

And now they were coming for him. For himself and Levi.

He’d known that they would come, that he and Levi would be run out of town in some fashion, but like this? With household items wielded as weapons? Calling for his and Levi’s blood? He’d only heard the stirrings of discontent yesterday, surely they should have had more time, and yet here they came, and they were sincere in their hatred. How could they be like that? How could they do that?

It was one thing to contemplate the possibility of the people he’d known behaving in such a way, and quite another to hear that they were already lighting the pyre, so to speak. How could they?

He asks himself this, how they could be such hypocrites, how they could hate the sinner while sinning themselves every day, sometimes with Eren as witness. He asks, but he knows the answer. Mobs don’t respond to reason. Mobs aren’t the individuals that make them up, no, they’re a horrifying amalgamation of the worst aspects of each individual, all echoing off of each other, amplifying each other until the individuals have vanished, replaced by the self-righteous din.

This isn’t about him, not really. It’s about them. It’s about their need to feel indignant, self-righteous, special. It’s about them wanting to feel as though they are part of a group, with a shared cause. It could have been anyone else at any other time, but the circumstances, the tilt of the world, had placed Eren and Levi in the center of the target.

They would have gone after anyone else, but this time they were coming for Eren and Levi. It was just so … sudden, so … evil. A completely different type of evil to the old familiar one that bubbled inside his own chest, something somehow worse.

A tear traced its way down Eren’s cheek as he felt a certain numbness creeping into his core, freezing out the warm feelings he’d once harbored for the people of this town. They hadn’t been especially warm, but the chill was certainly pronounced as the warmth fled in the face of the witch hunt.

He suddenly felt himself seized about the shoulders by warm arms and pulled into a somewhat desperate embrace.

“I know, baby, I know,” Levi shushed him, showing an almost uncharacteristic softness, “I know it hurts, but we have to go now, now come on, let’s pack you a bag, honey.”

Guided by Levi’s hands, Eren grabbed a satchel out from under his bed and began shoving items into it. A couple sets of clothes, a bar of soap, and the pocket watch that Levi had given him were all unceremoniously crammed into the worn leather bag. Still caught in a bit of a daze, Eren marveled at how few earthly possessions he really had. Was this all that tied him here? These few objects? It hadn’t felt like so little when he’d had them scattered about a room that he could call his own, but everything that he had now fit into one bag. With room to spare.

Bag packed, Levi grabbed Eren’s arm to lead him out into the hall, glancing cautiously from side to side before stepping over the threshold. Eren let himself be led by the hand, numb, keeping pace with Levi not because he was consciously trying to, but because it’s easier to be led than to think about why they were fleeing.  

This felt too much like another night, not all that long ago, when Eren truly lost himself and let the beast take hold. He’d been handed a bag back then too, shoved by protective hands out the back and into a cold and unwelcoming world, his whole life gone in the amount of time it takes to jump out a first floor window. That bag had been bigger than this one, but not by much, the vast majority of it taken up by food, not personal possessions. Once the food was gone, so was virtually everything that came from his previous life, everything that Mikasa and Armin had made, had touched. 

He couldn’t think about it, couldn’t let himself dwell on it, lest the tide grow all the more difficult to hold back. As it was, he could taste bile in the back of his throat, could feel the cold sweat gathering upon his skin to run down his spine, making his shirt stick uncomfortably to his skin. Beneath the numbness, a chill of panic was beginning to rise and the beast that had lain dormant stirred in its sleep.

Levi pulled Eren toward the stairs, sacrificing quiet for speed, a bag on his own slung over his other shoulder and, Eren vaguely noticed, the snap on his hip holster undone. Expecting trouble.

Someone would die this night. The only question was who, and Levi had determined that it would not be himself or Eren.

And as if on cue, a figure appeared at the bottom of the stairs, a man holding a sickle, no less, clearly expecting to reap something, and Eren could be sure that something wasn’t wheat. The figure opened its mouth, preparing to yell his sighting of the sinners, but no sound ever came from that mouth.

A shot rang out, echoing painfully in the close setting of the stairwell, causing Eren to cover his ears, hissing out the sound of his agony and closing his eyes. Then there was quiet, a dreadful quiet. For a moment, Eren feared he’d gone deaf, but as he removed his hands from his ears, he could hear the remnants of the shot ringing around them and the heavy breathing of Levi standing off to the side.

Where the figure had been standing, there was nothing there, prompting a moment of confusion before Eren looked down to behold what remained of one of his neighbors. The man lay slumped against the wall, clutching his throat in vain as hot crimson poured unimpeded from between his fingers, as if oblivious to his attempts to staunch the flow. At this distance, Eren couldn’t quite tell who the man was, but he could tell that the man was choking on his own blood, unable to scream, unable to cry, unable to make any sound besides wet spluttering as his life trickled away from him.

He’d been shot through the throat. He would not live out the minute. 

The beast roiled deep in Eren’s gut, a vile thing burning as if with an internal flame of its own, threatening to engulf Eren, to dampen his better judgement and replace it with vicious instinct. He hadn’t smelled the coppery tang of blood like this in so long, and he could almost taste it, sitting heavy and metallic upon his tongue, so thick was the scent in the air. It exhilarated even as it disgusted, setting his heart to beating faster, breathing heavier. He could feel himself to be not far from the edge, and as much as it horrified him, the thought of letting go, of releasing all the violence that he’d been restraining, was seductive, ever so tempting. 

The death rattle played a siren song.

Eren would like to say that he held back because he didn’t wish to be that monster, because he wished to save these townspeople, cruel as they were, from the danger that was himself, but in truth it was a secondary concern, rather than a primary one. What worried him more was the fact that, while Levi had accepted Eren as a killer, much as Eren had accepted Levi, Levi had never actually seen it with his own two eyes. He hadn’t even heard the full story in all its gruesome detail from Eren’s own lips, the tale having been told in the vaguest of terms, as hard for Eren to articulate as to accept. 

Levi loved him now, but would that love survive a massacre? 

Eren wanted to believe that the answer would be yes, but it wasn’t the sort of thing that could really be determined in the theoretical. Practical, real experience would have to tell the tale, and Eren would rather not risk the outcome. 

Levi loved him, but Levi was a survivor, above all else. If Eren showed himself to be beyond reason, beyond control, could Levi allow him to go on? Could he allow Eren to remain in his company? These were the questions that truly troubled Eren’s mind as he was pulled past the man now reduced to a mere pile of flesh in the stairwell, down the stairs, and through the back of the saloon, headed for the rear door. 

The path appeared clear enough just until the moment that a man burst through the back door that they had been headed towards, armed with a hatchet and eyes alight with a righteous fire, barreling straight for Eren and Levi with a yell quite unlike that of the civilized man who had worn that face the other day when he served Eren on his errand to the general store. Levi was closer and the man, William, as Eren remembered it, dove for him, taking him to the ground with the sheer force of momentum he’d built behind himself. 

It was as if something snapped in that moment, as Levi’s hand was snatched away from Eren’s own. It was almost audible, he could hear it in his head, the sound of something breaking, a noise like the breaking of a mirror, releasing myriad years of bad luck in the form of all of Eren’s internalized fear, anger, and thirst for blood. There was no moment of hesitation, no uncertainty to bind Eren with indecisiveness. Morality didn’t exist, nor ethics, nor shame, nor regret, the value of this man’s life rendered null by the threats he’d made to the things Eren held dear. It wasn’t something bad, not even regrettable, it just was what it was. Funny how such calmness and clarity could be found in a moment of absolute, untempered rage. 

Rage is an emotion of simplicity.

…

Levi found himself pinned by a man he vaguely recalled meeting before, but evidently hadn’t noticed enough to recall a name to put to the face, a relative stranger calling for his blood, a hatchet in hand and purpose in his gaze. In this moment, he no doubt believed that killing Levi was the right thing to do, the action ordained by God in heaven, but Levi had seen his type before. If he succeeded, he would be buoyed up by a feeling of righteousness, of satisfaction and security in his standing within the cosmos, but when the initial joyous madness wore off, he’d be horrified by what he’d done. He couldn’t accept it, so he wouldn’t.

Levi knew the logic, or what would be twisted to pass for logic. “That’s not the sort of thing that I would do,” would be the first thought, followed closely by, “so I couldn’t have done it.” Vivid memories of the actions undertaken would be eclipsed by denial, and in the end, Levi and Eren wouldn’t have died at all, they would just be gone, and no one would question why. If they did, they would have to accept themselves for what they’d done. 

With the average person, with the man who came at Levi now, that would never happen. He would lie to and about himself until his dying day in blissful, unconscious deceit.

But that wouldn’t be a long wait.

Levi squirmed beneath the man attempting to separate his head from his shoulders, one hand gripping the man’s hatchet-wielding arm with a grasp tight enough to leave bloody crescent moons in the man’s skin where Levi’s nails made contact. His other hand still grasped his pistol, but it was wedged between himself and his attacker, and it was proving a struggle to get it at an angle at which he could shoot and be sure not to hit himself. Even a survivable gunshot wound would do him no good now, once they left civilization in flight, infection would surely set in, and that could kill him just as thoroughly as any bullet. 

He didn’t see Eren coming until the boy came into sight just over the attacker’s shoulder. In the split second of stillness before Eren struck, Levi looked into his eyes, finding them as beautiful as ever, but … blank. The eyes were Eren’s certainly, but it wasn’t exactly Eren who was looking through them. This was something else

The weight that held him down was suddenly lifted as Eren seized his attacker from behind, heaving him bodily off of Levi and through a shelf of liquor bottles, a cacophony a breaking glass filling Levi’s ears as he sat up to watch the thing that looked through Eren’s eyes lay into his prey. He could see Eren’s back, turned to Levi, heaving with each hard inhalation of alcohol scented air, and then he saw red as blood splattered from the man beneath Eren’s hands, splashing out to cover the broken bottles that lay on the floor around them with a thick, sticky crimson. An ungodly shriek pierced the air, and for a moment Levi thought it had come from the man on the floor, but then he saw Eren’s head crane back and mouth drop open to release a scream the likes of which Levi had never heard before. 

Levi had seen many things in his time, and many of them had been horrifying. But he’d never before seen a man dismantled by the bare hands of another, and the sight froze him in place, watching Eren pull the man apart in pieces, rending flesh as easily as one might tear tissue paper. For a moment or two the man did struggle against the inhuman force that tore at him, grabbing a broken bottle from the now liquor-soaked floorboards and driving the blade of glass into Eren’s thigh with all the might left to a dying man. Eren didn’t appear to notice. He did not flinch, nor did he cry in pain, nor did he stop, merely continuing on, reducing the man to shattered bone embedded in rent flesh and torn skin, something almost unrecognizable as a human being, let alone someone whom Eren had known. 

After a couple, long minutes, there was nothing left to destroy, hardly any body left to mutilate, and Eren gradually stilled and silenced, simply sitting there, elbows deep in blood and viscera, surrounded and studded by shards of glass. Steeling himself, Levi pushed himself unsteadily to his feet, standing and walking slowly over to where Eren sat, his gun cautiously raised, if not aimed. 

“Eren?” Levi asked, his own voice sounding alien to him and far too quiet after all the screaming, “Eren, do you hear me?”

He reached Eren and the corpse, covering his mouth as he retched faintly. He wouldn’t have thought that a body void of life could have sickened him so, but this was hardly even a body anymore, just flesh and bone and a red stain upon the wood grain. 

“Eren?” He asked again, gathering himself and reaching out to lightly touch \Eren’s shoulder with the hand not occupied by his firearm.

Eren turned to look at him, his visage streaked with crimson, his eyes still flat and dead, so different from the lively boy Levi had known.

“Eren? Are you in there?"


	15. Head for the Hills

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Levi and Eren flee the town, running for their lives even as they each have to consider what recent events mean for the two of them and their life together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm really sorry for the crazy long wait, you guys. My life has been a bit nuts of late, by which I mean for the last several months, what with university classwork, Sakura Con, and trying to arrange my study abroad in France for the coming year. 
> 
> I also found myself disenchanted with my creative pursuits there for a while, a little depressed about it, and I couldn't bring myself to write or draw for a long time. But I'm feeling a bit better now, so you needn't worry.
> 
> Long story short, I've been awfully distracted from writing, but I'm back for a bit.

It took a moment, one hideously, impossibly long moment, but as Levi clutched the fabric of Eren’s shirt where it draped over his shoulder, the light slowly returned to Eren’s eyes, and while he still seemed a bit hazy, he had returned to himself. 

“Eren?” Levi asked again, tightening his fingers around the cloth in his hand, relieved to see Eren somewhat more normal, but all too aware of the other circumstances they still found themselves in.

“Uh-huh?”

The answer wasn’t much, but it was enough, and Levi could hear shouts ringing out all to close to where they stood, in close company with a mutilated corpse.

“Take my hand, baby,” he ordered, keeping his voice low so as not to startle, but strict enough to not brook any argument, “Hey, Eren?”

The boy’s eyes met his, but they were hazy, clouded by trauma and probably a guilt that hadn’t had the chance to catch up to him.

“You know what the secret to a long life is, Eren?” Levi asked, voice softening a little, a hand reaching out to cup Eren’s blood-spattered cheek.

Eren just shook his head, words apparently still escaping him.

“The secret to a long life is knowing when it’s time to go, and it’s time to go now. We’re getting the hell outta dodge, we’re taking a horse and riding for the hills as fast as we can go, okay?”

Eren just nodded, but again, it was enough. Levi reached down to take the boy’s hand, even drenched in slick crimson as it was, pulling him to his feet and hauling him towards the back door, gun raised and cocked. Ready. There was a chance that the man who now lay in a puddle slowly soaking into the wood flooring hadn’t been entirely alone, that the mob would not be far behind. 

Levi ducked his head around the door frame briefly, sizing up the challenges that stood between himself and Eren and the nearest horse that they could take off on. Gun raised, his eyes roamed over the ground and around the adjacent buildings, watchful for any movements that might betray an ambush waiting for them outside, but he saw nothing of the sort and, thinking he heard something at the front of the saloon, he darted out of the door, pulling Eren with him. 

Thankfully, though Eren seemed to still be lost somewhere inside himself, he was no hindrance to Levi’s flight, following at the man’s pace without a peep, eyes wide with some sort of shock. Shock, Levi figured, they could deal with later, when they were a couple towns removed from pitchforks, scythes, and a homemade gallows. For now, all that mattered was the escape. 

There’s something about it that chafes at Levi, much in the way that he imagines it chafes at Eren, leaving their minds red, raw, and stinging from the pain of fleeing a place that could have been home. That was home, for a little while. Levi’s always been on the move, ever since his mother died, but he hadn’t had to flee like this since the night of the funeral, the night he’d taken his first life. 

That night, he hadn’t known what to do, tearing off into the night in a panic, the satisfaction of having done the only justice he still could for his mother now dead not enough to counteract the fear of discovery, of capture. The terror of being caged, of being slaughtered like an animal. It still came to him sometimes in the night, waking him with fear rolling off of him in every bead of sweat as he emerged from the nightmare. But it had been just that: a nightmare, a bad dream of a memory. 

He’d left plenty of other towns in the middle of the night, even in the daytime occasionally, but that had always been the plan, laid in place ahead of time, should something go wrong with whatever job he’d taken on. That wasn’t true flight, running from an impending doom that sought him out with a personal vendetta or some misguided but firmly held ideas about righteousness. That had never hurt him. 

This hurt in a way that Levi hadn’t prepared for, hadn’t expected he’d ever experience again, and it pulled him back into the mind of a scared young man, little more than a child, taking off in the dark through the gutters of filthy city streets, no plan for where he might go, no friends or family to speak of in the world. It’s a lack of control, a sense of control snatched away, and Levi resented it with every bitter bone in his body. He couldn’t even tell if it was better or worse dragging Eren along through the muck with him; he appreciated - no, craved - the company, but the boy didn’t deserve this fearful flight through the darkness. 

Levi knew that Eren had made such an escape before, not unlike Levi himself, and that it still weighed heavy upon him, burdened by a cross placed upon him by the judgment of those who, falsely, thought themselves morally suitable to act as judge, jury, and executioner. He still bore scars, inward as well as outward, and he didn’t deserve them, This frantic disappearance into the dark of the desert night couldn’t help, and for all he knew that Eren wouldn’t have had it easy either way, Levi can’t ignore the role he himself played in all this. Had Eren never known him, the boy might not have had to run, even if he wouldn’t necessarily have been content. 

But that thought isn’t any good now, nor will it be. Things are as they are and Levi, when all is said and done, wouldn’t change a damn thing. He’ll run off into the night with the monster he’s fallen in love with and he’ll kill anyone who tries to stop him.

Fuck ‘em all.

Ducking from the shadow of one building to the next, Levi ran, the fastest he’d run since that fateful night, dragging his love behind him, his beautiful wrecking ball of a boy. He’d spotted a horse tied up at a post behind the general store, and while he couldn’t hope to recall who it belonged to, he could see the knot that held it in place. Stupidly trusting folk on any other day, one of the many caught up in righteous bloodlust for his own life and Eren’s had left the horse secured with a highwayman’s knot. The horse could pull as much as it liked and never find itself freed, but one sharp tug on the other end of the rope where it curled about the post would free them instantly. An easy way out. 

Levi wouldn’t thank god, nor fate, nor even his own luck. He thanked instead whatever foolish son of a bitch left a horse here for the easy taking. 

“Get up there, baby,” Levi urged, reaching the horse and pushing Eren to get in the saddle.

He could hear a clamor from the other side of the building, from inside the saloon, and it sounds like an untimely death. They’ve only got seconds until the mob rifling through the saloon finds the corpse of the man who had attacked Levi, and it they thought they felt a righteous rage, it would be nothing next to what they’d feel realizing that the homosexuals they now sought to destroy were murderers too. Though, Levi considered, it might take them a while to realize the body belonged to one of them and not to one of their prey. One couldn’t exactly call it recognizable, not once Eren had finished with it. 

With a little bit of effort on his part, Levi managed to maneuver Eren up onto the horse, flinching despite himself as he hears a nearby scream. They’d discovered the body. 

“Fuck!” he cursed, pulling the rope to free the horse heaving himself up onto the animal behind Eren, cradling the young man between his arms, held close against his chest, unsure if he could be completely sure that Eren would stay on the horse otherwise.

He didn’t look at Eren’s face as he did it, nor as he spurred the horse into action, taking off across the rough, dusty ground, headed for the distant hills that showed themselves only as masses of a darker black in the inkyness of the night. They could hide there easily, amongst the trees so deep a green that they appeared almost black themselves, a den in which these wolves in sheep’s clothing could hide, free from the threat of hunters. 

He listened intently to the sound of the thundering hooves, tensed for the sound of gunfire, of bullets whizzing past their heads, but beyond the screaming and shouts that faded as the distance between themselves and the township grew, there wasn’t much to hear apart from the whistling of the wind. 

The town would likely send out people on horseback, Levi knew, to reclaim the murderers who had fled. Had they succeeded in their escape before anyone died, they might not have been worth the trouble, but now, he and Eren could pretty much count on being followed at least for a while, until the righteous fervor faded, as righteous fervor is wont to do. Such intense impulses don’t last long, but the two of them wouldn’t be able to stop until they hit the tree line, and even then, some shelter must be sought. It’d be a poor idea to light a fire, so Levi could expect a cold night. 

Eren simply sank back into Levi’s chest, quiet and still as they rode like hell for the forested mountains.

“I tore that man to shreds, Levi,” Eren muttered, finally speaking but barely audible over the sounds of hoofbeats and the wind.

“I know, love, I know,” Levi whispered back, almost afraid to raise his voice to a normal volume, as if it would break the fragile tension that gathered in the air between them. 

“You’ve seen me at my worst now …” 

“I have.”

“Can you … can you still love me like that?” Eren shuddered as he spoke the words, full of fear over the response, but unable to resist asking. 

But there was nothing to hesitate over, not for Levi.

“Yes,” he said, pressing a kiss to the side of Eren’s head, ignoring the blood and gore that streaked the boy’s brown hair, “I can.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And now they're on the run. They could've escaped and gone on their way without too many people looking for them, had Eren not killed that man, but now they're wanted for murder. Murder is a charge that tends to stick. 
> 
> We're like halfway through now, guys.

**Author's Note:**

> The notion that most good ideas come to us in the shower is true. So y'all know.  
> This is my first Attack on Titan fic, and my second fic ever. I hope you will enjoy it!


End file.
